The 17 SKU lineup includes five 8-core CPUs, four 6-core CPUs and eight 4-core CPUs. We have two Black Edition 8-core CPUs, one Black Edition 6-core and two Black Edition 4-core CPUs. The Black Editions feature AMD’s clever Extended Frequency Range technology, otherwise known as XFR.
XFR automatically overclocks Ryzen, allowing it to exceed the default Turbo clock speed whenever the thermal environment allows. We’ve broken down the basics of how this technology works in an article a couple of days back, which you can find here. We also discussed how overclocking Ryzen CPUs will be very different from any previous AMD CPU.
It’s very clear why AMD has decided to bundle Black Editions with the highest performing cooler they have. The better the cooling the higher the CPUs will “auto-overclock” so to speak. It appears that our educated guess regarding the updated Wraith unit — code named “HS81” — has been confirmed. According to the table above, these high-end coolers will in fact be boxed with AMD’s Black Edition 95W Ryzen CPUs. Which include the Ryzen 7 1800X, 1700X and the Ryzen 5 1600X.
Unfortunately, the table does not include any clock speed specifications. However, thanks to information that came out over the past couple of days we’ve been able to confirm the clock speeds for at least three of the chips. The Ryzen 7 1800X, 1700X and 1700.
AMD Ryzen 7 1800X 8 16 16MB 95W 3.6GHz 4.0GHz 4.0Ghz+
Cooling Dependent $499
AMD Ryzen 7 1700X 8 16 16MB 95W 3.4GHz 3.8GHz 3.8Ghz+
Cooling Dependent $389
AMD Ryzen 7 1700 8 16 16MB 65W 3.0Ghz 3.7GHz No $319
If You’re A Gamer You’ll Love Ryzen
Among the eight different Ryzen 7 1700X benchmarks that leaked yesterday one in particular paints a very positive picture about Ryzen’s performance in games. When compared with Intel’s $1000+ eight cores the Ryzen 7 1700X showed incredibly competitive performance across a host of different workloads. Including single-threaded performance, which is arguably the most important for games.
It is very true that over the past four to five years we’ve seen many game developers work really hard on parallelizing their game and engine codes to take advantage of the multitude of multi-core CPUs on the market. An effort that was primarily driven by the fact that game consoles, which serve as the base on which the industry focuses its optimization efforts, have moved to 8-core AMD Jaguar CPU designs. As a game developer, making sure that your code is optimized to take advantage of multiple cores and threads was no longer a bonus but an absolute necessity.
Due to the nature of a typical gaming workload, one work thread will always be busier than any other running in the background. Often times in well optimized and parallelized games workloads are very intelligently spread across several threads, making the main game thread only slightly more intensive than others. With that being said, due to how incredibly complex and sporadic modern game worlds are, single threaded performance remains a key factor in how well the game can perform overall.
Huge Improvement Over AMD’s Previous Generation
This is where AMD has really stepped up to the plate with its Zen microarchitecture. Ryzen CPUs are considerably faster core for core and thread for thread compared to AMD’s previous generation. In fact, what the benchmarks tell us is that AMD’s engineering team did in one year what took Intel five to achieve. A whopping 40% improvement in single threaded performance, something unheard of in the industry.