Ok, so here are some things that don't add up AT ALL. We have MASSIVE variances in benchmarks between the review on TomsHardware and the reviews elsewhere. Somehow, in every single situation, Toms Hardware's tests either make Intel look better or they make Ryzen look worse. Let's explore this with a couple of examples, and I will only use reputable sites that have been around for a LONG time, not some kid with a YouTube channel. I think that Hard OCP is well respected, also Hardware Canucks and AnandTech should be well-recognised:
Ok, so here we are with the Ryzen 1800X which turbos to 4GHz but for some reason, it's only at 3.8GHz here, so what's crippling it? The numbers are also quite inflated compared to what Hard OCP's results are for the same game:
What's also really interesting (and telling) is that their Ryzen CPU is running at 4GHz in the CPU-focused 1280x768 setting of Ashes of the Singularity but only gets an average of 41fps which would seem to be consistent with the minimum frame rate of the "Ryzen 1800X HP" setting so perhaps that is a fair number, but only if Hard OCP is using minimum frame rates. The real problem here is the discrepancy between the results that the two sides have when it comes to the Intel CPUs. How is it that the i7-7700K, OC'd to 5GHz only shows 45.4fps while NON-OVERCLOCKED i7-7700K shows a MINIMUM frame rate of 59fps? Also, how is it that Hard OCP's 6900K OC'd to 4.3GHz only shows 53.1fps while Tom's test with an NON-OVERCLOCKED i7-6900K shows a MINIMUM of 61fps! It's quite apparent that the 1280x768 would be a more CPU-intensive resolution than 1080p especially with the CPU-focused setting. Why didn't Tom's Hardware use this like Hard OCP did? Also, why use the extreme preset? Doesn't that make it more graphics intensive? Some things here don't add up eh? How do overclocked CPUs get lower frame rates in lower resolutions than non-overclocked CPUs when games are most likely to scale well from increased clock speeds? Is it a mystery, or is it something even more sinister than that?
Then of course, there's the wording from the Workstation Section...
"It’s questionable if it’s a good investment if the application in question has been heavily optimized for Intel processors, but there’s no real drawback to its use as a general-purpose CPU."
How is it a questionable investment compared to CPUs that are more than double the cost but never even come close to showing double the performance and are in fact beaten at least once? Regardless of the applications shown, the Ryzen defeated the i7-6900K far more often than not and whenever it was beaten by the i7-7700K, the i7-6900K was also beaten. A very sneaky thing was also done as overclocked Intel CPUs were slipped into the mix to drive the ranking of the Ryzen down on the chart, this is a psychological tactic to give a visual impression of being worse than it is. In AutoCAD 2016 for instance, an i7-6900K overclocked to 3.8GHz was added to the mix with the normal i7-6900K. This was never mentioned in the testing methodology and again, Paul does his passive-aggressive best to make Ryzen look like a disappointment and make the Intel CPUs look like winners:
"The AutoCAD results remind us of what we reported on the previous page when we looked at output devices. AMD’s Ryzen 7 1800X ends up exactly where you’d think, based on those findings. There’s no real parallelization, but there’s plenty of system memory and cache usage, which turns out to be a combination that puts its performance squarely in the middling category." - In other words, it performs EXACTLY like an Intel CPU that is more than DOUBLE THE COST. Obviously, if the Ryzen loses to the i7-7700K, it is a loss, regardless of whether or not the i7-6900K at more than double the price ALSO loses to the i7-7700K. The overclocked i7-6900K is a clever way here to push the Ryzen down further in ranking while still being mute concerning the non-overclocked i7-6900K.
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This slide does the same thing, using the overclocked i7-6900K to push the Ryzen from the #3 spot where it could be called one of the leaders into the #4 spot where it justified Paul Alcorn's description of "middling". Again, the overclocked i7-6900K was never mentioned in the test setup, this is either very sloppy or disingenuous. Mind, you, I've never known Tom's Hardware to be sloppy.
In the 3DS Max test, these are the words used:
"As was the case with Blender, the 3ds Max benchmark distinguishes between several different areas, which don’t just include CPU rendering and, consequently, provide a good idea of what the work processes would feel like to the user. AMD’s Ryzen 7 is at a disadvantage when there’s real-time graphics output via the GPU or when only a few cores are used."
- Now, does that sound like an accurate description of a CPU that dominated two of five slides and defeated the i7-6900K in three of five slides? A non-biased way to say sum up the 3DS Max test would have looked more like this:
"As was the case with Blender, the 3ds Max benchmark distinguishes between several different areas, which don’t just include CPU rendering and, consequently, provide a good idea of what the work processes would feel like to the user. AMD’s Ryzen 7 is at a disadvantage when there’s real-time graphics output via the GPU or when only a few cores are used but in situations where many cores are used in a cpu-intensive task, Ryzen dominates." - It's another tactic in writing where the writer is quite willing to condemn a product's shortcomings but is completely unwilling to praise its strengths. The pro-Intel bias is clear.
In the scientific section, when AMD beats Intel, we get a non-dramatic, uninterested assessment like this:
"NAMD is a benchmark for high-performance simulation of large biomolecular systems. All individual tests went Ryzen 7 1800X’s way."
When Intel's VASTLY overpriced i7-6900K and i7-6950X CPUs beat Ryzen (even though Ryzen still beat out the i7-7700K) we get this:
"The Fastest Fourier Transform in the West, or FFTW, is a popular open-source solution to compute one-, two- and three-dimensional DFTs (Discrete Fourier Transforms). The C library makes heavy use of single-precision AVX these days, which proves to be a terrible thing for the Ryzen 7 1800X."
So basically, the word "Terrible" is used when Ryzen gets beat by the stupidly overpriced processors. Interestingly, Ryzen thoroughly defeats Intel's brand-new Kaby Lake architecture in this test that is supposed to be "TERRIBLE" for Ryzen, but not a word is mentioned about it. No, the i7-7700K is only mentioned when it WINS against Ryzen. Again, very telling, could it be that Intel wanted it this way?
So the gist of this review that I get (and Paul, if this wasn't your intention, I hope that you see now that it sure looks that way) is that Paul decided from the beginning that AMD was not going to have a chance here because he was going to take one AMD CPU and put it up against ALL of Intel's CPUs at the same time. So, if the i7-7700K got better frame rates (at gaming resolutions that nobody who pays $500USD for a CPU uses), then Ryzen is a failure. If the R7-1800X loses to the more-than-twice-as-expensive i7-6900K or the more-than-triple-as-expensive i7-6950X, then Ryzen is a failure.
The original thesis of this article is that Ryzen is a failure and then Paul went about proving it. Where is the praise for defeating the Kaby Lake i7-7700K in situations where that happens? This review seems to only acknowledge the Intel CPUs that beat Ryzen, not the Intel CPUs that Ryzen beats. For instance, this review only seems to recognise the i7-7700K's existence in gaming situations where it tends to win. I suppose that Broadwell and Broadwell-E are both phenomenal flops because they're clearly too expensive to even be compared to Ryzen despite the fact that they lose as often as they win against it (if you're looking at reviews on any site other than Tom's Hardware that is).
In this review, Ryzen is made to face every CPU in Intel's stable instead of what should be apples-to-apples. To make things worse, commentary is only made about the Intel CPU that perhaps beats Ryzen because it is completely specialised to that specific test. Again, the Ryzen will not be allowed to win no matter how expensive this review must go to find an Intel chip that will beat it which makes for a horrible comparison. If Ryzen does win, a rather bored commentary is made about it to make the reader skip over it. The way this article has been designed, the reader will think that it's the second coming of Bulldozer. Astonishingly, the price card is quite happily played when the less expensive i7-7700K shows completely trivial leads in gaming. I say trivial because no system builder is going to spend over $300 on a gaming CPU but then get a low-end GPU and game at 1080p, that's just plain stupid.
In this review, the combination of what is said and what is omitted work together to paint a tragically-skewed picture of a phenomenal product. It's really no wonder that people think Intel has some influence on these reviews when one sees reviews like this. I read this review and see a thickly-veiled and very well-put together assassination of what is in fact, the best all-around CPU in the world when the "holy trinity" of performance, price and versatility are taken into account.
There's no way to beat Ryzen in all metrics. In fact, the only way to beat it in most is to have three Intel CPUs costing thousands of dollars and even then, they won't win by much.
Some people are pure gamers and that's fair enough. REAL pure gamers though, game at resolutions that make the CPU completely irrelevant. Some people, like me and I would expect most others on this site, are high-end gamers but we do a lot more with our PC's than just that. I do video editing for instance and my main rig has almost 30TB of drive space (most of it full). For me, having a CPU that can encode video in the background but still have enough power left over for me play a high-end game to pass the time is far more valuable than a few extra FPS especially since I use a 4K display. I'd love to see what kind of gaming numbers the "holy" i7-7700K would get with something like that going on in the background. I sense that it would handle it well, but would take a far harder hit to its fps than Ryzen would.
So there's my "review of the review". I don't speak as an AMD fanboy because I'm not, I'm driven by a hate for the corporate practices of Intel and NVidia, not a love for AMD. I speak as a long-time and well-decorated expert of Tom's Hardware who cannot believe what has happened to this site that was once the best in the world, bar none, for ethical reviews and a wonderful lack of bias. I love this site, I always have and it breaks my heart to see so irresponsible a review like this. I guess Intel's hands reach even into the places that I thought were clean.