Over the past week, we’ve been treated to a whole host of AMD Ryzen leaks. We’ve seen specifications, pricing and even a full model listing come out. What has been missing are leaked benchmarks that tell us the true performance of the chips. Building on top of the CPC engineering sample leaks, we now have what appears to be a full suite of Passmark benchmarks run on a final qualification RX 1700X engineering sample.
First up, the RX 1700X sample was run on the budget A320 AM4 motherboard that does not feature any overclocking support. Interestingly enough, the chip clocked in only at 3.4 GHz and either has no Turbo boost or the Turbo speeds were not detected. Of course, this chip normally features a 3.4 GHz base and 3.8 GHz boost according to the identification string. The 8 core 16 thread chip with 16MB of L3 was also running slow DDR4 timings (17-17-17-39 2T) @ 2400 MHz which could impact the results negatively.
Overall, Ryzen is putting up a good showing in the synthetic Passmark CPU tests. In 5 out of 8 tests, the R7 1700X manages to beat out the i7 6900K and in 6 out of 8 tests, it is ahead of the i7 5960X. Both of those chips are in the $1000 range so if the $400 price of the RX 1700X holds true, AMD is going to be raking in the sales. In the overall test, the R7 1700X does fall behind the Intel offerings but not by much, coming in at 9% and 4% behind the Broadwell-E and Haswell-E chips respectively.
More importantly for gamers, of course, is the single threaded performance. Here Ryzen continues to offer a strong showing, keeping up with the various Intel chips. While Passmark is less sensitive to IPC than other benchmarks, the relative performance compared to the other chips and to Bulldozer means AMD has got Zen working very well. Even if Ryzen was boosting to 3.8 GHz, it looks like the x86 CPU space will finally be seeing some disruptive competition.
