In April of last year, AMD went from always a generation or three behind to blindsiding Intel with their shockingly competitive first-gen Ryzen processors based on their all-new Zen architecture.
Fast forward a year, and second-gen Ryzen with Zen Plus has been around for a few months now, with no response from the blue team... yet.
But in spite of all of this, among many enthusiasts, there's still this attitude that persists that goes,
well, if you're not poor people, then you should just get Intel.
So we decided to challenge that perception, and we've got some interesting findings to share with you today.
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We know that some of you are just gonna skip to the conclusion anyway, so we're gonna make your life easier.
The short answer is, yes.
AMD is a viable alternative to Intel, but the long answer has a few...
butts in it.
Now, initially, we had wanted to do an in-depth exploration into things like cache hierarchies and
IMC peculiarities, plus, you know,
did-you-knows like Infinity Fabric connecting the dies inside of Ryzen running at half of the memory clock.
But I mean, let's face it, if you guys cared about that kind of stuff, you'd be watching Gamers Nexus.
So we're gonna focus on the results.
Frames per second in games, render times in professional applications, and a side dish of power consumption and storage.
Before we even get there, though, we need to talk about price.
When we built up and priced out our two competing tests,
Benches it became obvious why some people see AMD as the the poor man's choice.
Between Intel's higher CPU price, and lack of a decent included cooler on their k-series chips, our AMD platform was over
$60 cheaper.
Finally, you guys probably noticed that we're running at different memory speeds.
Intel's IMC actually does tend to handle high frequency kits better than AMD's, but their spec is
actually
more conservative.
And we're leaving overclocking out of this comparison today.
So this is bone stock apples
versus officially supported apples.
First up then is our gaming benchmarks.
In a huge surprise to only the small group of AMD fanboys
who insist on remaining willfully ignorant for some reason,
in the overwhelming majority of cases,
Intel's 8700K defeats the Ryzen 7 2700X.
And in some cases, like in GTA 5, by a substantial margin,
I mean, I'm talking 20 to 30% greater performance
depending on the resolution.
And that 4K result really stands out.
I mean, that is a resolution that should be GPU bound
on pretty much any modern processor.
If our recent video about system bottlenecks
is anything to go by.
With that in mind, you can put down your pitchforks,
hashtag AMDRAID.
And I'm gonna go ahead and get into the red team
because we are going to point out
that not once did we encounter a situation
where our gaming experience
at the same graphical settings, of course,
went from playable on the 8700K to unplayable on Ryzen.
It just doesn't change that the 8700K is better for gaming.
Full stop.
And that's even before you get into anomalies like CSGO.
For the record,
enabling gaming mode via AMD's Ryzen Master software
actually dropped the FPS across the board
with like two exceptions and requires a restart
in between modes.
So we're not huge fans of it.
Our Ryzen 7 2700X did win
in some of the synthetic gaming benchmarks though,
thanks to its two extra cores,
which doesn't indicate anything about real games,
but does foreshadow our productivity results.
Out of the 11 tests we ran, AMD is offering outright,
one nine, sometimes putting significant distance
between itself and the blue team.
I mean, 7-zip was 50% faster,
which it should be noted does affect aspects
of your system's performance
beyond just unzipping the files
you download from the internet.
ASUS real bench encoding was 32% faster
while multi-threaded Cinebench was 28% faster.
I mean, Intel did remind AMD
who the single threaded boss was by beating
it by 15% in single threaded Cinebench,
but that was its only win with our last result,
the real bench image editing test,
almost as close as the results of the last scrapyard wars.
So basically a tie depending on who you ask,
but there's more to life than CPU performance.
Let's take a look at some of the quality of life differences.
One thing that we noticed was that game load times
were affected when we moved between platforms.
Even with the exact same drive,
we found a variance of up to 15% each way
with Intel on average ending up about 5% faster than AMD.
And like the differences in gaming benchmarks,
this isn't something that you would immediately notice
in a Pepsi challenge taste test, but it is there.
Power consumption was also about 10 Watts higher at idle
and 20 Watts higher under load on the AMD platform.
Finally,
we wanted to touch on the accelerated storage options
that each platform features,
because we really feel that this is an excellent way
to get better than hard drive performance
while not giving up on capacity.
Now we did a more in-depth piece on this a little while ago,
but in summary, Intel has obtained caching,
which we have seen work wonders on game load times.
And then from our testing,
AMD's store MI is more cumbersome to use
with some unpleasant limitations.
Well, the big winner, if you watch that video,
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So there you have it.
AMD is a less expensive solution compared to Intel,
and it mostly loses in gaming.
So you know what?
The trolling from the gaming crowd
about AMD being a second rate solution,
that does have some merit to it, unfortunately.
But the easy comeback is,
well, it's great that your machine games faster,
but I've got real work to do.
And if that is actually true of you,
then AMD is a great choice.
I mean, really the only thing that could disqualify
either of them at this point is platform stability.
And Ryzen has matured a lot since its initial launch,
to the point where as long as you don't need store MI,
the final answer comes down to what your mix is.
And as usual, it depends.
Are you a 60% productivity person who games on the side?
Go Ryzen.
And don't look back.
You saved a buck, but you still got a great system.
What's wrong with that?
Meanwhile, are you the gamer who froze together
the occasional headshot compilation video?
Well, you might wanna consider paying the Intel tax.
With new graphics cards comes more FPS
that can be unlocked with a faster gaming CPU.
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