 ["The Star-Spangled Banner"] Oh! Oh! I just sat through over three hours of AMD presentations. And what do I have to show for it? Well, we know it'll be available starting 2-22-2017, which is today, and that performance will be competitive with Intel's Core i7 lineup. But as we've been saying for so long, that means nothing if it's priced the same. So is it? Well, as it stands today, AMD Ryzen looks poised to deliver top-shelf performance, and do so at an incredibly disruptive price. So let's have a closer look. ["The Star-Spangled Banner"] So we'll start by talking about the lineup. All the general stuff we confirmed back at CES is still true. Dual-channel memory, overclockable across the board, assuming you've got a motherboard chipset that supports it, and 24 PCIe lanes. But we have a ton more details now. So at the top of the product stack is the Ryzen 7 1800X. This is an 8-core 16-thread processor, okay, that we knew before, but now we know clock speeds. It runs at 3.6 to 4 GHz, though it'll actually boost up to 4.1 with what they're calling XFR, or Extended Frequency Range, assuming you've got the cooling horses for it. And it is coming in at a tiny, well, okay, it's still expensive, but $499. AMD is positioning this a $95.00, $500.00 part up against Intel's $130.00, $1,000.00 6900K. Though as usual, the top-of-the-line part isn't necessarily the most compelling, and things get even more interesting as we work our way down the stack. So behind me here is the 1700X. It still gets the X for like, X factor. So it's a 95-watt part, you should expect better overclocking out of it compared to a non-X part, and it still features their Extended Frequency Range, so it runs from 3.4 to 3.8 or 3.9 with appropriate cooling. It's still got 8 cores, it's still got 16 threads, and it does all of this priced at $399, which puts it competitive with the 6800K, which is actually the demo that they have behind us. Before we do the demos, we've got to introduce the good member of this good, better, best product stack. This is the Ryzen 7 1700. This guy is a little bit unique. You still get 8 cores, you still get 16 threads, but now we're talking significantly lower clock speeds. 3 GHz base, up to 3.7 GHz boost, and you get a significantly lower TDP, 65 watts, making this the lowest rated 8-core desktop processor on the market. And you will be doing this at a slightly lower price, $329, compared to a 7700K. So that would be a quad-core 8-thread processor that it's going up against. But come on, Linus, enough spreadsheets! Show us! Show us! So they gave us access to their Cinebench demo, unsupervised, which was unwise of them. Let's go ahead and run that while I explain what's going on behind me. So we have a Ryzen 7 1800X, remember that's the top of the line one, $499, with 16 gigs of RAM on some validation board. Then over on the other side, they've got the hardware right here, we can see it, we've got a 6900K running with 32 gigs of Corsair Dominator Platinum on an ASUS ROG board, so they really couldn't give it much more of an advantage. And then we're running Cinebench with multi-threading enabled, and the results are in. So right here, here's the 6900K, you can actually see, remember it's okay, nothing's disabled, 1479. And over here is the Ryzen 7 ZD3601B, and it's an engineering sample, but whatever, it's a Ryzen 7 1800X, 1600 marks at half the price. Now obviously this isn't the whole story when it comes to CPU performance, but it is definitely an impressive demo. Though not as impressive as this one. I'm gonna press this big red button, which has been beckoning at me since I pressed it five minutes ago. Woo! And I'm starting what AMD is calling their MegaTasking demo, which is a combination of Blender and Handbrake designed to test the multitasking of these CPUs, although I believe MegaTasking was like an AMD TM thing that they were using back when they were marketing, I think it was tri-cores or six cores or something like that against Intel's quad cores and dual cores. Anyway, all of that's ancient history at this point. The point of the demo is that we are timing how long it takes to run this Octane demo and this Handbraking code that you can see here is running in the background on these two systems. So they've put the 1700X, remember this is the 399 8-core 16 thread, up against Intel's Core i7 6800K. Once again, the systems are similar, though AMD has for whatever reason kneecapped themselves with 16 gigs of DDR4 versus Intel's 32 gigs of DDR4. And now I just have an awful lot of time to kill, so I will use this opportunity to talk about how they have a lot of cool systems here on display from all of their partners. This could be one of the most complete AMD ecosystem launches that we have ever seen. I think they're saying something along the lines of 82 motherboards available at launch with more to come, and I think it was 18 system integrators that are going to have systems ready to go at launch. It seems like there's a lot of confidence in the AM4 platform. While the AMD system's done, maybe we could just like time lapse through this so people know we aren't faking it. There we go. Okay, so 91.6 seconds versus 112.1 seconds. I mean, none of this should be that surprising from a pure performance numbers standpoint. I mean, we're looking at an 8-core 16 thread processor versus a 6-core 12 thread processor. But AMD is not designing this test to be fair in terms of core count to core count. They're designing it around pricing. This chip on the right costs less than this chip on the left. Really? Yeah. Wait, oh! You were in the same presentation I was! Leading us finally to what may be the most disruptive skew of all, the 1700. So this one is, as I said before, 329, putting it around the same price as a 7700K. And you can see right here, they've got two demo systems running again side by side with a Ryzen 7 1700 8-core and a Core i7 7700K. And they're playing Dota 2 while streaming using OBS at the same settings. They really let us get a lot closer to the demos here, so we're able to validate all of this stuff ourselves and demonstrating how, and I had been asking for this for many generations, why is the mainstream still limited to quad-core? So they're showing us how more cores can benefit a multi-threaded workload even for gamers. So the Core i7 7700K stream drops frames, while the 1700 stream does not. This last demo, Battlefield 1 at 4K, is actually one we've seen before. Sort of. We've had some of the blanks filled in this time, so we already knew that Ryzen Unnamed was up against a 6800K with DDR4 memory and dual Titan XPs and SLI, but what we didn't know was exactly what that Ryzen chip was or what speed it was running at. So now we know it is actually their lowest tier, Ryzen 7 1700. That's the 65-watt part, and we know that it runs at anywhere from 3 GHz to 3.7 GHz. In this case, it's running at about 3.65, which might tell us something interesting about the granularity of the way that Ryzen boosts. Anyway, back to the game. The other key difference between then and now is that AMD has their boost technology working. So while at CES, frame rates were the same to within a frame or three, now here we are looking at exactly the same starting scene, driving our tank exactly the same way, and Ryzen 7 1700 has a clear performance advantage and a significant one. Now, to be fair, AMD is picking their battle somewhat here. They could have put it up against the much more similarly priced 7700K, which due to its higher frequency is in most cases a better gaming CPU than a Core i7 6800K, but there's no denying here that there's a compelling value case to be made for this chip that outperforms a 6800K at about $100 less. So all that's fine and good, Linus. This is the kind of CPU that we can have. 4.8 billion transistors, 2 kilometers of signal wiring, if we're not concerned about putting graphics processors inside them. But you've left out the most important part. Does it have RGB? And the answer is yes, you are looking at an RGB AMD stock cooler. So thanks for watching, guys. If you disliked this video, you can hit that button. But if you like it, hit the like button, get subscribed, maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured today at the link in the video description. 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