Performance per Dollar Measurements
This section of the review is where we attempt to consider the prices of the various CPUs being tested when presenting the performance data. The method is straight forward and asks the question: how much do you pay per unit of performance? The answer is more complex of course because these graphs don’t portray the raw performance of CPU and depending on your use-case, you may personally be willing to pay more for more performance up to a certain breaking point. That point will vary from customer to customer.
Because the 1800X has such a poor showing in the single threaded Audacity results, the value of this CPU is not impressive when compared to Kaby Lake. Still, the $499 price tag, half that of the 6900K and a third of the 6950X, means that Broadwell-E is less cost efficient. The same holds true for Cinebench R15 single threaded results.
All of these results show fantastic results for the value proposition of the Ryzen 7 1800X. The “cost per performance” meets or exceeds the Kaby Lake options in our testing while jumping well ahead of the 8C 6900K and the 10C 6950X. In these applications, not only are you getting peak or near-peak available performance, you aren’t over paying for it.
With the performance discrepancy described on the previous page, it shouldn’t surprise you that the 1800X isn’t nearly as cost efficient an option and in fact is less cost effective than the less expensive 7700K. Only the 6900K and 6950X (2-3x the cost) end up looking like a worse deal for users only concerned with gaming at 1080p.
(Again, worth noting, we are looking more into the gaming results here to find a potential reversible bug or conflict.)
So, did it ever occur to the
So, did it ever occur to the reviewer that the a bit slower performance in some software (games included) is actually due to poor optimizations?
The industry used the last decade or so to specifically optimize for Intel.
Ryzen is fairly new by comparison, but it demonstrated that it got up to 30% increase in performance through simple patches in games.
Audacity and many other software like it are not optimized for Ryzen architecture.
They are taking advantage of every possible trick in Intel’s hand, and yet barely anything or none of it actually benefits Ryzen performance-wise.
Plus, the Infinity fabric in Ryzen is sensitive to RAM speeds.
2400 MhZ speed on RAM is simply inadequate for Ryzen… 3000 MhZ would be better as that would raise it’s performance by about 10%.
Other than RAM speeds, software optimizations are required to take advantage of Ryzen’s capabilities.
Otherwise, you might as well be comparing apples and oranges right now.
It actually shows that Ryzen via ‘brute force’ is highly competitive for all Intel’s products… just imagine what might happen if we get developers to actively support for Ryzen – of course, this will probably require time as devs usually optimize for hardware they are paid to optimize for – and as we know, both Intel and Nvidia have deep pockets to sway devs to support their own hardware specifically and make AMD look bad (when in reality, its anything but).