Conclusion
First of all: If you’ve skipped here, and if you haven’t seen the video or read the article, you waive your right to complain about anything said in the conclusion. Go read or watch the rest. We don’t retype everything in our conclusion for people who skip ahead. The entire article is the conclusion.
Working our way from neutral to the rest: If you already own Ryzen 1 systems and you are considering upgrading, don’t bother. Skip this generation. Performance-wise, it’s not a huge climb, and a trivial OC can get most of it.
But raw performance is sort of the wrong way to look at Ryzen 2. The performance improvement is in voltage at a given frequency, which is now sustainable at a much lower value than previously. At 4.0GHz, power consumption is pulled down significantly, voltage requirement is pulled down significantly, and thermals (obviously) are pulled down. This is where AMD made its gains. Frequency is unexciting. We wanted 4.5GHz, and that didn’t come close to happening. All of our chips are stuck at 4.2GHz, maybe 4.25 (on ambient).
What we got instead was a massive uplift in volt-frequency curves, and that’s important.
As for purchase or upgrade considerations for those who don’t presently own a Ryzen CPU, the R7 2000 series parts seem fine. You’ve got all the charts above – make a decision from those. We’d recommend the non-X CPUs (e.g. 2700), as the R7 2700X basically just pre-overclocks for you. That’s not difficult, and is something that can be done in moments while saving $30. The same is true for the 2600(X), but we’ll talk about that in our next piece. We’d recommend the R7 2700 (with an OC) for anyone who needs the CPU to render, but can’t afford HEDT parts. An example of this use case would be project files that exceed available GPU memory, as system memory is more readily expanded in greater volume. We’d also recommend the R7 2700(X) for anyone who might be streaming daily, perhaps as a job or one-day-job, if handling processing on the local system that also handles the gaming. We would recommend the 8700K for a flat-out gaming PC, as it is hands-down the best gaming performer. The 8700K and 2700X oppose one another well; they each fill a role where the other falls behind: The 2700X exceeds 8700K raw performance in game streaming and 3D rendering; the 8700K exceeds the 2700X in raw gaming. Pick based on your needs.
We’re working on some major volt-frequency content with thermals, so check back for that.
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