Should YOU Upgrade to Ryzen?
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2018-05-06
·
1,170 words · ~5 min read
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in the late 90s and early 2000s there was actually a pretty good chance that
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someone shopping for a pc was buying one for the first time maybe to check out
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that newfangled internet these days though not only does pretty much every
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household in the us already have a computer but with the slow iterative
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improvements that Intel has been making over the last five years unless it's a
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pretty darn old one it probably does
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everything they really need it to do and an upgrade to the latest hardware
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would be unlikely to bring about a worthwhile increase in performance but
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AMD's ryzen promised to give people a
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reason to upgrade again bringing more processing cores than ever before to
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lower price points than ever before so
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now that the whole lineup is available is it actually worth the upgrade for you
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we've got the answer and you can watch the video for it or you can just click
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shade tree sunglasses are handmade from hardwood feature polarized lenses and
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come with soft and hard carrying cases use offer code Linus to get five bucks
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off below performance aside
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verizon's early bugs prevented us from issuing a
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full-on recommendation but the good news
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today is that many of the issues present at ryzen 7's launch have now been fixed
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as long as you don't try using RAM faster than 3200 megahertz which we've
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tested to be the point of greatly diminishing returns anyway and this is
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great because there are reasons to upgrade to a new system beyond raw CPU
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speed both mechanical and solid-state drives slow down over time maybe you've
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got a bad capacitor somewhere causing weird stability issues or maybe you just
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want more modern features like m.2 drive
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support and native usb 3.1 10 gigabit the last of which is actually unique to
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AMD's platform at this time now our initial testing of each ryzen product
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has consistently put AMD's offerings in the same general ballpark as the blue
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team's similarly priced modern counterparts typically trading off per
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thread performance for sometimes vastly superior multi-threaded performance with
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background tasks like encoding and
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streaming gameplay simultaneously benefiting dramatically you can see just
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how much in our stream quality investigation here so AMD likes to think
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that all of this makes for a very compelling deal
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but how does ryzen stack up against your old
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battle station we've grabbed four common cpus off the
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shelf since the turn of the decade to answer this question once and for all
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now as we dive in with gaming and single-threaded workloads we can already
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see how the trade-off between per thread and multi-threading impacts ryzen
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it generally trails behind even Intel's
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older hardware and games but beats even Intel's newest offerings
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in multi-threaded workloads so if you're a gamer running an older
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core i5 or core i7 and you are into
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streamer and you're not interested in any of the platform improvements
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honestly you might be better off investing in
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some more cool games to play or like a new wireless mouse or something
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with that said if you're in the never Intel camp and you're an AMD user who's
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been waiting and waiting for a compelling upgrade
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go ahead pull the trigger and feel good about it
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now let's look at the productivity and creative workloads wow
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if your use case isn't purely gaming
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it's pretty much a sure thing that you're going to realize some kind of
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noticeable performance benefit from an upgrade to ryzen
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as we observed in our launch reviews even compared to Intel's latest and
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greatest in today's multitasking world
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especially ryzen 5 and ryzen 7 are an
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absolute breath of fresh air ryzen delivers a strong value for
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multitaskers and content creators pretty much across the board
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now we could have just left our comparison there but it's pretty common
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practice as a system nears its best before date to try to squeeze a little
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more life out of it through overclocking so we decided to take advantage of
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ryzen's across-the-board overclocking support and run all the tests again
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against the older cpus also overclocked
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overall the story here is actually pretty similar to be honest Intel's cpus even
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going back five years are great for gaming and turning up the juice on them
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wasn't going to change that with that said for the folks with mixed
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workloads you know 3d animator by day gamer by night
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those guys will be really happy to see ryzen
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continue to dominate the workloads that they need to make money
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and close the gap somewhat in games pushing
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more of the system bottleneck onto the GPU
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so it comes down then to what matters most to you Intel is the undisputed
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gaming king and even folks with second
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or third gen core i5s and i7s
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wouldn't see enough performance benefit to justify an upgrade to ryzen
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and sadly outside of some edge cases
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like high refresh rate 1080p gaming that kind of applies to Intel's latest too
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but if you're an AMD user or
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your work relies on multi-threading or heavy multitasking then you'll find that
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ryzen has a lot to offer and without
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unforgivable sacrifices in gaming especially if you pair it with a b or x
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series motherboard and a decent cooler so you can take advantage of xfr and
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overclocking to get the most out of it so then as i mentioned before you'll
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and this purchase comes with quick two to three day shipping
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so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit the like
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button get subscribed maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video
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description also down there you'll find cool shirts like this one at our merch
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store and our community forum where you can talk shop with other tech
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enthusiasts