AMD Ryzen AM4 Platform: Processors and Motherboards

At the moment, AMD Ryzen 7 1700 with a price of $330 is the most affordable 16-thread processor on the market. For comparison, the most senior chip AMD Ryzen 7 Summit Ridge 1800X BOX Price from 7 954 up to 8 148 ₴, and the competing one is Intel Core i7 Broadwell-E i7-6900K BOX Price from 36 900 up to 39 114 ₴. And it is not so important that the base frequency of the Ryzen 7 1700 is small – only 3 GHz, because, firstly, there is auto-acceleration up to 3.7 GHz (only for four streams), and, secondly, you can resort to additional manual overclocking up to 4 GHz (already for all sixteen streams).

Unlike AMD Ryzen 7 Summit Ridge 1700X BOX and 1800X, which are currently sold exclusively without a cooler included (Tray version), the 1700 chip is complemented by a Wraith Spire cooler with a 95 W heat sink, noise level up to 32 dB and LED backlight. You can't set overclocking records with it, but it's still enough for reference frequencies and a little overclocking.

Who is the target audience of AMD Ryzen 7 1700? These are primarily video editors. Modern video editing applications are perfectly able to parallelize video rendering into sixteen or even more streams. Secondly, these are gamers who like not just to play games alone, but to broadcast their matches on the Internet in real time and simultaneously communicate with the audience (streamers). Sixteen streams are certainly enough for a comfortable game and for smooth streaming. The rest of the PC users will have enough of a cheaper Ryzen 5 processor.

AMD Ryzen 5 1600 is a junior twelve–threaded processor based on the Zen architecture. It costs only $220, whereas its higher—frequency counterpart is AMD Ryzen 5 Summit Ridge 1600X BOX Price from 2 548 up to 3 287 ₴. The suffix "X" in the chip name means support for XFR technology, which automatically increases the processor frequency above the norm if the cooler handles with the heat sink at the same time.

The competitor from the Intel camp is not so much a 12-line Intel Core i7 Broadwell-E i7-6800K BOX , how much is 8-stream Intel Core i7 Kaby Lake i7-7700K BOX Price from 5 860 up to 6 300 ₴. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, Intel Hyper-Threading technology for parallelizing one physical core into two threads is more thorough than similar AMD SMT (Simultaneous Multithreading). Secondly, the Ryzen 5 1600 even manually rarely accelerates above 4 GHz, whereas the i7-7700K easily takes the bar at 5 GHz.

As a result, AMD Ryzen 5 1600 is an excellent option for building a PC, so to speak, for growth. If you don't need twelve threads right now, then it's likely that you'll need them in a year or two. Computers usually don't upgrade for five years or even more. If you don't want to bother with manual overclocking, pay $30 extra for the 1600X model.

The most interesting, in our opinion, representative of the AMD Zen family is Ryzen 5 1400. This eight-threaded chip is an accelerated one and a half times replacement for AMD FX-8000 octa-cores, but at the same time it costs even a little cheaper than the younger quad-core Intel Core i5 Kaby Lake i5-7400 BOX .

After manual overclocking to 4 GHz, the Ryzen 5 1400 processor becomes the best solution for its money for a gaming PC with a graphics card of the Gigabyte Radeon RX 480 GV-RX480G1 GAMING-4GD , GeForce GTX 1060 and even GTX 1070 (see the article "Overview of GeForce GTX 1050, 1050 Ti, 1060, 1070 and 1080 graphics cards"). After all, only one single game can load more than eight threads so far – Doom 2016.

In addition, all Ryzen 5 processors have hidden potential. Internally, they are all sixteen-threaded, with the only difference being that a quarter or half of the threads are blocked. Remembering the successful practice of unlocking cores from AMD Deneb chips, I would like to hope that this will become available for Zen in the near future. Thanks to this, the 170-dollar Ryzen 5 1400 would sparkle with even brighter colours.

Motherboards with an AM4 processor slot on a younger A320 chipset, in my opinion, are not worth buying. They do not support overclocking of the processor and RAM, while both of these functions are quite important for the Ryzen platform (groups of cores interact with each other through RAM). Therefore, a mandatory minimum is the Asus PRIME B350M-A motherboard on the B350 chipset.

This AMD chipset is the answer to the Intel B250 (motherboards cost the same). They both support the increasingly popular M.2 SSD drives (see the article "Speed up any PC: the five best SSD drives of 2017"). That's just the Intel B250 processor and memory overclocking does not support, so the Asus PRIME B350M-A looks more advantageous.

Made by Asus PRIME B350M-A with an emphasis on reliable and durable operation. The power subsystem is protected from power surges, the Ethernet socket is protected from a lightning strike (from a direct hit, for example, in a private house, of course, will not save), and the printed circuit board is protected from delamination due to high humidity. The HDMI, DVI and VGA video outputs on the rear interface panel of the motherboard are made with a margin for the future, because so far all the released AM4 processors are devoid of integrated graphics. Zen hybrid chips will go on sale at the end of 2017 or at the beginning of 2018.

You can scold the Asus PRIME B350M-A except for the lack of radiators on the processor power circuit. Because of this, it is unlikely to overclock the 16-stream Ryzen 7 to the limit. Otherwise, it is a good–quality and relatively inexpensive motherboard for eight- and twelve-thread Ryzen 5 processors.

The Asus PRIME X370-PRO motherboard differs for the better from solutions on the medium-level B350 chipset with eight (six chipset plus two due to an additional controller) versus four SATA disk connectors, as well as support for bundles of two NVIDIA SLI or three AMD CrossFireX graphics cards. In addition, it has a radiator on the mosfets of the processor power supply, which promises good overclocking potential.

If everything is clear with overclocking the processor (maximum 4 GHz), then everything is ambiguous with overclocking the memory. The motherboard itself supports a memory frequency up to 3200 MHz, but Ryzen processors rarely overclock it above 2900 MHz. And in the case of using four RAM modules at once, the frequency will have to be further reduced.

To ensure the ability to install both old and new CPU coolers and its motherboard, the Asus PRIME X370-PRO received forked screw holes, which is commendable. The proprietary ASUS Aura Sync technology allows you to synchronize the colour and intensity of the backlight of the motherboard and other PC components, if, of course, they support it. As a result, we get a motherboard for avid gamers and computer enthusiasts: with a good overclocking potential (radiator on mosfets and convenient mounting of coolers) and a beautiful appearance (black and silver colour and backlight).