Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Level1 Throwback: Revisiting Ryzen 1, Six Years Later!”.
Oh, this is going to be a fun one, because it’s a lot confirmation bias it’s gon na suck up to all the AMD fans in the audience. What have you bought? Am4 really early in the launch cycle and you’re rocking an 1800x you splurged, not just for the 1700.. What does your upgrade path? Look like in 2023. Were you right? How much money did you save what if you’d gone team blue instead with the Plucky i7 7700k? What does that look like in 2023? I was sort of curious, so we dove in with our Plucky little B, 350 motherboard from MSI. Let’S take a look foreign. Let me set the stage for you. The year is 2017..
It’S a bygone era: four cores on the desktop was pretty standard stuff and would benefit four cores on the desktop for for quite a while since Haswell. Well, since the i7, 2600k 2700k 2700k 2600k. Those CPUs were legendary, there’s probably still people in the audience that are going to comment. Yeah, I’m still using my 2600k might be time to upgrade a while back but hey you know whatever. In Stomps AMD they’ve got their New Zen micro architecture coming on the heels of bulldozer, which I thought was pretty good, but for gaming and the highest single thread performance intel was unquestionably King and the interesting thing about the Zen launch was that even with the Zen Launch intel was still unquestionably the king of single thread performance, but AMD launched the ryzen 1700., a mere 300 U.S at the time, and it was eight cores eight cores in a desktop platform with a dual Channel memory. It’S very skeptical of the performance of that.
How do you have enough memory bandwidth to make that work? How is this even possible? Well, first, gen Zen was not without its cores, and this is actually a b350 motherboard, but this is one of the you know: sort of early launch motherboards, not exactly so. This is even the cost down motherboard and this particular system pairs that am4 socket with a ryzen 1800x, which was not 300, and that 1800x was almost as expensive as the 7700k, with its four cores and eight threads now in this system, you might have also rocked A GTX 1080. pretty good value at the time, something you could acquire in in 2017, and a lot of people were still rocking 10 Series gpus today, the GTX 1060, I think, is still the most popular or very near really the most popular GPU on Steam.
Today, in 2023, this system rocking a ryzen 1800x and some g-skill memory, uh 16 gigabytes – in this case, two eight gig sticks but uh, it’s not pretty slow. I mean, when things launched on the am4 platform, 3600, wasn’t a thing: 3200 wasn’t a thing. You know 29.33 and depending on how much memory you had maybe slower than 2933, maybe 26.66 was what you could expect and there were definitely teething issues around both the memory controller and the USB and everything else. There’S, no denying that. Of course, you know I Intel had similar problems with USB on their x299, which lasted for three generations.
It was a different socket different time and uh Intel is still currently today in 2023, struggling with her two and a half gig next, you know to 25 226. These things, you know, everybody struggles with something: the GPU power connectors network cards uh, it’s all a buggy mess, but this video is not about that all right, so you’re rocking the 1800x in 2023. There’S a couple of choices before you. What do you get when you upgrade your GPU? Well, I think that if you were smart money in 2017 and you got the 1800x, you splurged a little bit on a CPU and yeah – it’s not the x370 motherboard, but there are x370 motherboards. You got this and the reason you’re still rocking that 1800x on this motherboard is because, well I mean you could have upgraded to ryzen. You know 2000 series, maybe 3000 Series, depending on the board, now in particular CS go check this out CS go. The 7700x is leading the 1500x 3D. What gives well probably a combination of pcie and memory speed.
I mean the giant v. Cash will make up for memory, speed to a point but am5 with the new faster memory. It’S not even a fair fight versus the 1800x. I mean, let’s be real 30-ish FPS at 1080p, no matter what CPU you’re rocking, but if you upgrade to something a little bit better than a GTX 1080. But if you upgrade to something a little better than that GTX 1080 car 6750.
You can more than double that frame rate, but the interesting thing here is how well the 1800x is doing. 65 FPS versus you know, 71 ish or 73 for a 5800x3d, which does pull ahead of the 7700x. Shows that this game probably could use a lot of optimization, but yeah GPU upgrade is where you want to go first and you could hobble through with the 1800x. It is very surprising that Ford spoken works at all on. The 1800x AMD was a little reluctant to support newer, CPUs and am4, and it makes sense why putting in a lot of actual real play time with this system which we’ll talk about. But what about the 6750? It’S a relatively recent GPU, let’s upgrade our 1800x to that! The results May shock you so to make it clear what we’ve done is we put our 6750 XT in our 1800 x system and done a bunch of testing, but not just that testing, let’s also compare side by side to a 77 to 100x system and also Upgrade our 1800x to a 1500x3d, so the systems in play are our original 1800x, with just a GPU upgrade our original 1800x system with a GPU and a CPU upgrade, and then a totally new system running the 7700x on am5 with new, faster memory.
It’S interesting because the 1800x is end of life. You know, Windows, 11, doesn’t even really technically support that and windows 11 doesn’t really technically support. Any 7000 series Intel CPUs either you’re going to need at least 8 000 series or newer.
So you know the six core. We move from four to six cores. Gosh was that really so long ago, and also that seems like yesterday, it’s just so strange. So the question becomes: okay, we’ve upgraded to the 6750. The performance is looking pretty good there. What happens if we also upgrade to a 5800x 3D? Ah, that’s where things sort of got interesting with our gaming results.
So that’s sort of you know frames everything that’s going going on. The 1800x really did do surprisingly well with a modern GPU, and actually our 5800x 3D did a little worse than expected, and you dive into the results here and try to figure it out what’s going on. Why does our 5800x 3D system not do as well as a modern counterpart, say the 7700x on am5 with all new ddr5? How is it that am5 is out running our 5800x 3D 15800x3d was outperforming the 7700x when compared on a modern platform. That’S the interesting part.
So if you put a 5800x 3D in this b350 system, which again AMD, was reluctant to support when the 5800x 3D launched, even though physically the socket is the same, it sort of becomes clear that b350 x370 not necessarily going to support pcie E4 correctly. Those boards you know in in my case this GPU is running at PCI, Express 3 speeds and that’s really the difference. If you look at our shadow of the Tomb Raider results and you look at the individual screens in Shadow of the Tomb Raider and compare them – you can say. Ah, okay, our CPU is doing really amazingly well. Look at the result here. The 5800x 3D should be performing faster. Is this down to the slower memory speed? Well, maybe I mean the 1500x 3D having an enormous amount of V. Cash means that memory speed doesn’t matter as much, but this is launch day, am4 or very early in the am4 cycle and remember these early am4 motherboards don’t tend to like Fast memory either.
So that puts us at a little bit of a disadvantage. The 5800x 3D and our am5 socket. Yes, it is handily outperforming the 7700x in CPU limited scenarios, but our b350 and x370 platforms don’t really quite support. All of the cool features of the 5800x3d, namely in my case with this setup on the b350 tomahawk pcie4, and so our GPU is not running in kind of an optimal scenario here for pumping data in and out and that result kind of lines up with a Lot of our other game benchmarks, but before I talk more about the benchmarks, I also want to talk about the 5800x3d in a newer motherboard. If you put the 5800x3d as an am4 upgrade in a 400 or 500 series, motherboard meaning x570, or something like that, you’re going to have performance out of the 1500x3d, that is consistent with your favorite reviewers review of the 5800x 3D, especially at resolutions like 1080p. If you look at it purely on those numbers, if you were an early adopter, you should be smugging the knowledge that your platform is a heck of a lot more valuable today in 2023, because there’s an upgrade path, you can have the crappy power supply from 17 Million years ago you can have the motherboard from 17 million years ago.
You can pop in a brand new 5800x 3D on fire sale at your local favorite retailer and enjoy basically modern levels of performance. With that caveat that exception that I haven’t really seen a lot of people talk about it’s not quite as good. The 1500x3d is hobbled a little bit in this older platform, especially compared with am5, and that wouldn’t be true if the motherboard and everything else were updated. Maybe the memory were a little bit faster, but in terms of best bang for the buck upgrade first, it’s definitely the GPU, because a 1500x3d is not going to make the 1080 any faster.
So 67.50. Okay, that’s sort of you know. We don’t have anything 7000 series. Gpus that cost less than 900 right now and you’ll probably pay more than that. If you get an aftermarket card because you’re wanting to stay away from Vapor chamber gate still the 6750, our Phantom gaming ASRock 6750, it’s an incredible value in this scenario because it performs so well and it’s relatively affordable and it’s available in the market and there’s not Really any sort of pricing Shenanigans going on, but I was surprised that the 1500x3d is a little bit slower than the 7700x. I expected to do the 7700x testing and show you it’s like look. 1500X3D is going to outperform am5 in all scenarios, can’t wait for those am5 vcash CPUs to get here, but it doesn’t in this scenario with the older motherboard and the older, much much slower memory and everything else. So that’s the end of the video right. I mean the conclusion here is: if you have something like this and you want to save a few bucks, uh upgraded the 1500x 3D. Yes, and no, if you were so smart and so smug and early adopting the am4 platform and helping AMD, you know, work their way toward maybe perhaps becoming the dominant CPU maker on planet Earth, at least at least for x86.
Ah, I mean you contributed to their success by adopting the am4 platform right, I mean that’s what you think is an early AMD adopter. I I don’t know that I would necessarily disagree with that. I mean good job. Bravo good, sir, and you even adopted the 1800x.
You didn’t opt for the the pleb tier 300 8 core 1700, which showed that the AMD was serious business. You opted for the 1800x, which was the highest performing eight core part that was still a reasonable and affordable price. I know you feel the itch to upgrade to am5, but why would you leave that on the table You’re Still rocking an 1800x in 2023.? So here’s what you do! You upgrade your am4 system with that 1500x3d you sell this.
There are people on eBay, selling old, garbage running on this 12 year old xeons. This is a much better deal. This is an easier cheaper upgrade for you, and this will run circles around those old-school.
Xeons. You sell this system, then you get am5 or at least you’ve got the option of doing that now. Do you want to early adopt the flagship 7950x? Do you want to wait for a v cash CPU and adopt that Flagship, CPU and then just enjoy that system? For the next you know five six years as you have enjoyed this Tomahawk b350 – maybe maybe you just popped the 5800x3d in this system and just roll it out for another couple of years and then it’s like. Oh, are you running a b350 in 2025? 2026? Maybe that’s what amd’s enabled then I can’t help but go back to our 7700 in 2026.
What do you got Linux as an operating system? I mean Windows 10. What is 11 I mean. Maybe you could hack your windows 11.. I don’t know it’s not it’s not! It’S not feeling as fun. Can you upgrade that platform to anything? Well, I mean there are other Chinese motherboards that take way more CPUs, because it’s just kind of mix and match and something to do with power, delivery and blah blah blah. There are hacked z170 motherboards, that’ll run the eight core 9900k there’s some physical hacking involved there as well. I there’s something magical here and I can’t quite put my finger on on it. I can’t quite articulate it, but everybody that built such a system is still enjoying such a system in 2023 or Beyond as you’re watching this. There is something magical about being able to do that, and that was amd’s promise and they didn’t really promise that you would be able to run the 5800x 3D in launch day am4 and, having done that, I get why they did that because well you’re leaving a Little bit of performance on the table or Phantom gaming 6750 can even go a little bit faster than it goes in this uh Tomahawk, b350 motherboard from from MSI. I get why AMD was reluctant to letting board Partners support that in this socket. Some of the speed difference here is probably also down to memory speed, but understand that that enormous cache makes that less important, plus also, like I said, getting fast memory to working these older 300 series.
Motherboards is a non-starter most of the time, but this was a fun Journey. This was fun for am4 and if you want to have similar fun with am5, I wouldn’t hold it against you. I think that would be pretty interesting.
I probably would pick one of the more expensive CPUs if I’m planning to Coast, that out on the order of four or five years, so that I can upgrade to whatever. The best thing I can get is in a couple of generations Beyond. You know from 1800x to 1500x 3D is like 7 000 miles of upgrade on that Plucky little socket and it’s fun to imagine moving another 7 000 miles as we get to the end of the am5 socket in several years, at least, and if you have a Bit of smug, self-satisfaction for adopting am4 really early in its life cycle in a system like this, this I see you, I acknowledge you, you did pretty good, I’m one of this level, one I’m signing out and you find me in the level one forums. .