What's it like using the first Ryzen CPU for gaming in 2025? [RandomGaminginHD]

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THE_GR8_MIKE@reddit

I used a 4th gen i7 for modern games until last year. I'm sure this thing is fine.

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kiliandj@reddit

First gen ryzen mainly excelled in more heavily multithreaded things lile video editing.

And even on that front it wasnt THAT impressive. The big shock with ryzen 1000 was that it was anywhere near intel performance. That had not happend for like 8 years at that point. So this isnt that much of a suprise.

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LittlebitsDK@reddit

and also the price for it... was a huge seller...

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Just_Maintenance@reddit

R7 1700 for 330 was a steal

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exomachina@reddit

It was only a steal if you valued the extra cores. Even those only really mattered if you were hosting VMs or rendering really long videos. They didn't really translate in gaming or everyday multitasking. Pretty sure it launched right before the 8700k too and a ton of people were holding out for that CPU. For good reason.

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jnf005@reddit

R5 1600 for i5 prices was also another steal from zen 1, people may be used to 6 core being the main stream budget option nowadays, but before zen anything over 4 core forces you to the hedt platform which cost even more on the mb side, not to mention intel 6 cores like the 5820k and 6800k cost around the 400 mark

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narwi@reddit

Kaby lake (and for a long while beofre that) i5 was 4 core, i7 was 4 core 8 threads. Coffeee lake i5 was 6 cores no ht, i7 was 6 cores 12 threads.

but really, we are seeing the same stagnation in ryzen now. ryzen 7 ought to be coming with more memory channels and cores by now.

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Healthy_BrAd6254@reddit

Yeah Ryzen stagnation is real. Same core count on mainstream for about 8 years now

Just as long as Intel stayed on 4 cores.

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nanonan@reddit

They have something to offer there. If you need more than sixteen, they have threadripper. Intels complete obliteration in HEDT is real.

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teutorix_aleria@reddit

We are getting 12c mainsteam cpus with zen 6 at least.

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Rentta@reddit

Now only if we also get scheduler updates on windows

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Healthy_BrAd6254@reddit

Why would that matter? Windows has no problem with 8 cores either. If we now get 12 cores on one CCX, it should not be different

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cyborgedbacon@reddit

This isn't a simple matter of it being about the number of cores a CPU has, it comes down to the architecture, and how Windows sees/communicates with them and designates those tasks. Ryzen 1000 suffered from performance issues, because Windows didn't know how to correctly work with Ryzen's core setup. While its gotten better over the years, Microsoft is still releasing updates to make sure Windows utilizes AMD correctly.

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Pillokun@reddit

like is has been stated it was because there was a penalty between the cores or rather the l3$ belonging to its core being on a different ccx. basically same issues we see with cpus with two ccx:es.

zen3 and newwer did so its entire ccd was one single ccx, ie one big l3$ for all the cores on the ccd.

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Healthy_BrAd6254@reddit

Ryzen 1000 to 3000 had 2x4 cores per CCD (2 CCX). Since Ryzen 5000 it's 8 core CCDs (all 1 CCX)

How would going from an 8 core CCX to 12 core CCX worsen anything for Windows? It would be the same as a 12 core monolithic Intel CPU. No issues there either.

Windows only has issues with dual CCDs.

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Pillokun@reddit

agree

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Pillokun@reddit

if we get 12 cores on a single ccd than the schduler is not an issue, windows usually just put workloads on a core that is avaible. If they are on the same silicon on the same "ccx" then there is no issue.

If we get p/e core u-arch on the same ccd then we have issues.

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theevilsharpie@reddit

Yeah Ryzen stagnation is real. Same core count on mainstream for about 8 years now

Just as long as Intel stayed on 4 cores.

LOL, what?

From Zen 1, Ryzen has doubled the core count of their parts (mainstream is 8 cores, higher end is 12 and 16), massively increased the cache (and then increased it massively again with X3D), massively increased clock speed, drastically improved performance of AVX2 (and implemented AVX-512), and has just all-around improved various aspects of performance.

The performance leap from Bulldozer to Zen 1 was absolutely massive. The difference between a Ryzen 7 1800X and a Ryzen 7 9800X3D is even larger.

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shroudedwolf51@reddit

It's also worth remembering that to a vast majority of people, more than eight cores is largely not particularly useful and how improved IPC, frequency, and memory latency are the actually useful parts. Like, back in the day, I bought a 5900X specifically because my boss gets weird with what he wants and sometimes I need to encrypt and zip a .7z archive at maximum compression preset that's dozens of gigabytes at the pace of yesterday (I couldn't afford the 5950X and the X3D parts didn't exist yet). If it wasn't for that, I could have gone for a 5600X and that would have been more than enough for gaming and VR.

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ResponsibleJudge3172@reddit

Its not like the 4 core was limiting back then. The hate by this argument was unkustified

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Healthy_BrAd6254@reddit

Ryzen 7 1700X 8 cores

Ryzen 5 1600X 6 cores

Ryzen 7 9700X 8 cores

Ryzen 5 9600X 6 cores

Really not that complicated. How do you not understand?
Yeah they did increase performance a lot, obviously. Only the core count is where they stagnated. Even the street price per core stayed largely the same.

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theevilsharpie@reddit

Ryzen 7 1700X 8 cores

Ryzen 5 1600X 6 cores

Ryzen 7 9700X 8 cores

Ryzen 5 9600X 6 cores

Really not that complicated. How do you not understand?

You listed two arbitrary SKUs in the respective families, while failing to mention that the Ryzen 1000 series SKUs you listed the mid-range and high-end, while the 9000 series SKUs you listed were the low end.

The 12- and 16-core Ryzen 9 parts are now Ryzen's high end, while the X3D parts offer 600+% more L3 cache than even the best that Ryzen 1000 offered.

Your comparison was against Intel's numerous generations with the same quad-core part with barely any performance increase between successive generations, and that's not the case with Ryzen at all.

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ClearlyAThrowawai@reddit

The price at each level has not changed much. The 12 and 16 core parts are substantially more expensive than the 8 cores were back then.

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theevilsharpie@reddit

There's been about 30% inflation from 2017 to today, so accounting for that inflation, a Ryzen 7 1800X and a Ryzen 9 9590X launched at around the same price.

As well, if you wanted 16 Zen 1 cores, you had to move up to a Threadripper 1950X, which is not only considerably more expensive than today's 16-core Ryzen parts, but had much pricier motherboards as well.

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Healthy_BrAd6254@reddit

Arbitrary? lol okay

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teutorix_aleria@reddit

ryzen 7 ought to be coming with more memory channels

This is segmentation to keep Threadripper relevant for more use cases. If you really need memory bandwidth you need threadripper.

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narwi@reddit

sure, but I want more segmentation, not less. so not just either 2 or 8 memory channels, but also a segment with 3/4 in the middle between HEDT and vanilla.

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teutorix_aleria@reddit

We already have that Ryzen is 2 channel threadripper is 4 channel and threadripper pro is 8 channel.

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UsernameAvaylable@reddit

More memory channels for consumer hardware are just a no go unless you are soldered in. Mainboard layout, cost factor of needing to populate them all for nominal performance, etc.

On the professional side you can easily get a dozen channels.

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narwi@reddit

this is not a credible issue given the price of X870E motherboards. X870 might just as well been a "we mandate 3 / 4 memory channels" and these would still be expensive motherboards but not by much.

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SirActionhaHAA@reddit

ryzen 7 ought to be coming with more memory channels and cores by now

That's happening next gen but the point stands that more mt is kinda useless for majority of the consumers. 9950x ain't providing meaningful experience difference over a 9700x for the average desktop user, you'd probably not even know that it has double the cores without checking.

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goldbloodedinthe404@reddit

You should look into what AMD is doing with strix point and the ryzen AI max processors they are doing almost everything you just said lol

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soggybiscuit93@reddit

with more memory channels

This is like arguing that cars have been stagnate for a century because we still have 4, 6, and 8 cylinders.

128b memory is fine for a desktop CPU. Improvements come from new generations of RAM.

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Blueberryburntpie@reddit

One of my friends back in 2018 showed me two budget builds he was looking at for about the same price:

Ryzen 1600 with a B450 board. Can do CPU and RAM overclocking.
i3-9100F with a board that has overall less features. CPU and RAM was locked down.

If I recall correctly, he overclocked the 1600 and its RAM to have a higher single-threaded performance over the i3.

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Top-Tie9959@reddit

I remember everyone buying the 1800x which was $500 when all the benchmarks showed the 1700x (and often the 1700 on many workloads) performing like 95% of the 1800x. Never made any sense to me.

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ResponsibleJudge3172@reddit

Because the by far biggest channel at that time Linus Tech Tips pushed Ryzen a LOT. He especially loved the Cinebench performance

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LittlebitsDK@reddit

yeah I bought the 1700... then later slapped the 3600 on

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noiserr@reddit

And even on that front it wasnt THAT impressive.

You could get a $399 1700x (but often cheaper) which basically performed as well or better than the 6800k which was like $1100.

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Csalbertcs@reddit

Man, I remember when AMD was selling the 8350 over and over and it was just so bad compared to Intel offerings. Huge fan of how they turned it around, I just upgraded my Ryzen 1600 to a 5700x last month on a b350 board.

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theloop82@reddit

Then Intel sold skylake for like 9 generations! I’ve been rocking a x470 through 3 different processor generations over 7 years and it’s still just fine for gaming. Intel would change sockets every few years just out of spite before they had real competition. I hope Intel can come back with a strong one soon to keep the rivalry going cause everyone benefits when they are trading blows

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jtblue91@reddit

Yeah people were so shocked with what AMD had achieved with the Ryzen 1000 series because the FX line was so dogshit haha

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KetoSaiba@reddit

I just retired my r7 1800x back in April.
that thing was a monster. Loved it for productivity. Obviously it's showing its age now, but it did 6 years.
First Gen ryzen had snowflakey stuff like faster ram timing very affecting performance.

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nismotigerwvu@reddit

Yeah, there were lots of little adjustments to make on the RAM side to get it to run to it's full potential. That said, those 1st gen x370 motherboards have proven themselves. I went from a launch day 1800X to a 5800X. I kinda wish I had sprung for the X3D but I upgraded before the price cut and it was hard to justify at the time.

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KetoSaiba@reddit

I just swapped to a 5800XT.
I am very much trying to ride til it dies on the am4 platform.

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nismotigerwvu@reddit

Yeah my plan was to skip AM5 and hop back in on AM6.

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masterfultechgeek@reddit

The R7 line more or less matched the 6800x while running on $80 motherboards instead of $300 boards and also simultaneously being priced as low as $300 for the CPU (vs $1000)

The R7 line did NOT beat kabylake in gaming overall but was still "fine" for people who didn't buy the fastest card on the market for 1080p gaming. It was basically tied with an OCed 7700k at 4K.

The R5 line swept the floor vs the Kably Lake i5s in productivity. It also beat them in newer/more demanding games (lower frame rate scenarios). It did NOT win in older/high-frame rate esports titles.

My expectation is that in the real world (mid range CPU + mid range CPU), the R5 was generally the better gaming chip.

------

This is at/near launch.

About 6 months later intel upped the core count of their desktop line by 50%. This are up most of the reason to go for Zen 1 and in my view Zen + wasn't a big enough jump.

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maybeyouwant@reddit

Also the the R5 1600 was a better buy than 7600k with 4 threads.

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UsernameAvaylable@reddit

Yeah. People don't remember how bad the bulldozer family war.

Zen 1 could keep up in multithreading and was behind in single core. Zen 2 was ahead in multithreading and about even in single core. Zen 3 is when they were convincingly in the lead.

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kyp-d@reddit (OP)

A casual video that put into perspective that core count is not the only metric for gaming performances.

Ryzen 7 1800X (OC) vs Core i3 12300 in a few older and more modern titles.

Zen1 was never a great performer to begin with but even with 8 cores it's still way behind a modern 4 cores CPU.

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BlueGoliath@reddit

Oh first Gen Ryzen sucks now according to this subreddit? lmao

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261846@reddit

Objectively it was still worse than Intel, but the reason Zen 1 was and is beloved is because of what it represented

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BlueGoliath@reddit

This subreddit and others went from "first gen Ryzen good" to "it was worse than Intel but we like what it represented" lmao.

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Johnny_Oro@reddit

It was like intel's current Arrow Lake. Not great performer, but represents a great leap in its architecture. Namely, the usage of chiplets.

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Strazdas1@reddit

it helped that it was much cheaper than Intel offerings at the time.

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wankthisway@reddit

Those two statements are not mutually exclusive. You realize that right?

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Plies-@reddit

It can be good, and still worse than what Intel was offering at the time (in a lot of facets). The price to performance in multi threaded applications was way better though.

Also people were absolutely fed up with Intel by 2017 and absolutely liked what Ryzen represented in terms of price to performance.

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Strazdas1@reddit

it always did. It wasnt until third gen - Zen 2 - that AMD CPUs got good.

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inyue@reddit

It was way behind by my 4670k that was released like 5 years before it... Well at least for things that only scaled up to 4 cores...

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Johnny_Oro@reddit

And 4 threads. Hyperthreading in 4770K really helps.

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TalkWithYourWallet@reddit

core count is not the only metric for gaming performance

You're unfortunately going to get nowhere with this

Reddit is obsessed with core count despite numerous evidence out there that core count within the same CPU generation doesn't appreciably affect gaming performance

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Burgergold@reddit

Well even if it does not now, when I bought my 8cores in nov 2024, it was to keep it for the next 5-7y

So I'm pretty sure at that point that 8 cores may perform better than 6

Just like 6 now is the norm over 4

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TalkWithYourWallet@reddit

People made the same argument in 2019 with the 3600/3700x

The 3700x hasn't aged any better

The Xbox One/PS4 used 8-core CPUs, 13 years later we still aren't seeing games requiring 8 cores

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ResponsibleJudge3172@reddit

You mean vs 3600X or vs 9600X as I have Sen people compare?

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TalkWithYourWallet@reddit

I mean a 3600 vs 3700x. 5600 vs 5700x, 7600x vs 7700x etc

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Strazdas1@reddit

unlikely. Unless you use it for paralelelized workloads or play strategy sims that actually utilzie the cores its mostly useless because in next 5 years we wont be over cros-gen for next console gen so all games will be aimed at current slow consoles.

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nanonan@reddit

You're right, for most games even say a 3300X will match a 3600, but it was bloody nice for people with real tasks to have options that didn't cost the earth.

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Bobguy64@reddit

Is this the part where everyone tells you how smart you are and congratulates you on your brilliance?

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Strazdas1@reddit

no its the part where you failed to take in any context to what you read.

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996forever@reddit

They really aren’t wrong about the general notion of this Reddit particularly around the Zen2/3 days though.

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Bobguy64@reddit

6 cores being the sweet spot for gaming isn't a revelation, it's well known knowledge, and has been for a while.

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TalkWithYourWallet@reddit

It's like I said. You can't get anywhere with this discussion on reddit

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996forever@reddit

I wish I had some of the gems from back then saved. But here’s a tangentially related and hilariously similar one, about gpus instead:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/lxhvm9/any_news_on_when_ray_tracing_will_work_on_radeon/gpozhnb/?context=3

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TalkWithYourWallet@reddit

That's a banger, actually made me laugh

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kikimaru024@reddit

And until consoles get more than 8 cores, developers won't target more either.

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TalkWithYourWallet@reddit

But developers aren't targeting a core count in the consoles

They're targeting the consoles level of CPU-performance

The PS4 used an 8-core CPU. And got bodied by quad cores that were far faster

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no_no__yes_no_no_no@reddit

Bulldozer 8 cores is more similar to 4 cores with smt rather than 8 independent core

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iDontSeedMyTorrents@reddit

Jaguar in the Xbox One and PS4 was not related to Bulldozer, FYI. It was an Intel Atom competitor.

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TalkWithYourWallet@reddit

Which goes back to what I said

The overall performance of the CPU is more important than the core count

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Numerlor@reddit

early zen is in a bit weirder spot with cores compared to others as you have them in multiple CCXs with horrible latency inbetween, combined with the cores themselves underperforming and a bad imc it's not much of a surprise that it falls behind so much

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WaterLillith@reddit

Zen got good (for gaming) with Zen 2 onwards.

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JonWood007@reddit

Zen 1 was pretty bad. They were like 30-40% behind intel there.

Zen+ reduced this to around 20-25%

Zen 2 reduced this to 10-15%

Zen 3 they were ahead

Then alder lake came out

THen they added X3D to Zen 3 and were on par with the 12900k

Then Zen 4 and raptor lake were about on par outside of X3D, which thrashes everything.

And zen 5 barely improved on zen 4, and arrow lake ended up being like intel's version of zen 1, regressing to alder lake performance in gaming. And Zen 5 X3D once again thrashes everything.

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narwi@reddit

you hould be comparing it to 7700 though. which also had 4 cores.

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ColonelBoomer@reddit

Shoot i used a 1700 until maybe 1.5 years ago or whatever. IT was a solid CPU, yes it was not the best for gaming, but considering i came from a FX-6300, it might as well have been a Ferrari to my shitty commute car.

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gajodavenida@reddit

Are you me? I went from an FX-6300 to an r7 1700! Still rocking the 1700, tho. Hopefully not for too long

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ColonelBoomer@reddit

That depends, what was your GPU for your FX and then what did you use with the 1700?

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gajodavenida@reddit

Same gpu, the shite, but still rocking, r9 380. At the time I was a kid that wanted to make and edit videos, so I only upgraded my cpu to the best I could afford

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ColonelBoomer@reddit

I was rocking a 960 with my FX-6300. Then i wanted a whole new PC, so bought a 1070 first and the bottleneck with the FX-6300 was insane. Of course once i got the rest of the PC with the Ryzen 1700 it ran great. USed that from the launch of Ryzen until the 7000 series came out. So a good long life once i replaced my 1700 with a 7900X and i replaced my GTX 1070 with a AMD 7900XT.

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WaterLillith@reddit

Oh, I remember when people claimed that this would age better than a 7700K or a 8700k for gaming because of the cores and game only used like 30% of the total CPU!

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capybooya@reddit

Its a fools game to plan for longevity except the extremely obvious. I have a slight preference for IPC over cores based on history, but its hard to know what moment of history you're in. In the early days of Intel 4c era everyone said you should get the 4c/4t part for gaming. And that proved correct for a long time. But if you still had that CPU by the time covid and inflation came around and everything was expensive you were pretty miserable compared to the corresponding 4c/8t part which definitely would last you longer.

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catal1s@reddit

Yea I remember ryzen 1 and 2 got undeservedly high praise on reddit despite both having pretty terrible single core perf. (worse than even cpus from 2013 / 2014). A lot of cores, but slow ones, good for niche tasks or certain multicore optimized ganes but bad for everything else including most games, web browsing, most apps, etc. Reddit just hates intel that much it gaslit people into thinking those early ryzens were much better than they actually were.

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WaterLillith@reddit

One of the most common thing I started hearing back then was "What about Chrome, Spotify and Discord running in the background!?" or "What about if you want to stream?" as if suddenly everyone was streaming.

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IguassuIronman@reddit

Just like people talk about AI stuff/local LLMs for GPUs these days

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catal1s@reddit

Yea lol. Also don't forget how suddenly everyone was doing 3D rendering, video encoding, physics sims etc, when in reality 99% of people who bought those's CPU's would rarely, if ever do such tasks. Furthermore, even back then, many of those could be done much quicker using GPU acceleration (i remember using nvidia's hardware video encoder nvenc more than 10y ago already). Nowadays the CPU is becoming even less relevant for those tasks as more and more programs implement GPU acceleration.

And finally the price, the 1800x was around the 500 usd mark wasn't it? A 7700k was 300 or so i think. Yes sure slower in those niche computation tasks, maybe a bit less suited for heavy multitasking, BUT cheaper, faster in almost all games, faster in web browsing and day to day usage. The 1800x was a terrible value, except for those rare cases where you were actually doing physics sims or 3d rendering on the daily.

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JonWood007@reddit

Yeah but most people werent buying 1800x, they were buying 1700s, at the same price as the 7700k, and then OCing them to 1800x performance.

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WaterLillith@reddit

1800x sucked, R7 1700 was the best value 8 core.

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JonWood007@reddit

I had a friend with a ryzen 1700 who was like "i can play a game while playing another game!", I mean that's nice but not particularly helpful.

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JonWood007@reddit

YEP....

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shalol@reddit

8700k is a whole different generation when they started actually using more cores

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WaterLillith@reddit

7700K, 1700X and 8700K all released in 2017

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shalol@reddit

Still a 40% multithread improvement gen over gen

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Elyseux@reddit

Still use my 1700 overclocked to 3.7Ghz daily. It helps that in the few competitive games I play, it's generally enough for me to get over 100 avg frames (with Marvel Rivals being my first regular game where I've really felt how slow my CPU is), and in the story games I do play, usually my 2060 is the limiting factor before my CPU in reaching a steady 60.

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FenderMoon@reddit

Yea, first gen Ryzen was maybe about on par with CPUs in the Sandy Bridge / Ivy Bridge / Haswell era. Way, way better than the bulldozer stuff they were putting out before, but still a little bit slower than the Skylake / Kaby-Lake / Coffee-Lake stuff Intel was putting out at the time.

AMD made up for it by having really generous core counts. The single threaded performance was close enough, and the multithreaded performance was impressive.

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