Ryzen or i7

[dominic2005]

Good morning.

I am currently looking to build a complete new rig, and I am stuck on which direction to go in: i7 (tried and tested and proven) or Ryzen 7 (new, promising but unknown).

The best option is for me to list the components I have chosen for each direction and then ask for input...so here goes...

i7 System:

CPU: Intel i7-6800k
MOBO: ASUS Rampage v Edition 10 X99
RAM: Team Group Night Hark LED 16GB PC24000C16 (2 Sets for 32GB Total)
GPU: ASUS STRIX-GTX1080 A8G Gaming
CASE: Phanteks Enthoo Primo
PSU: XFX XTR Black Edition 1250W 80 Plus Gold Modular
SSD: Samsung 960 EVO Polaris 500GB M.2 2280 PCI-e 3.0 x4 NVMe
COOLING: NZXT Kraken X62 AIO 280mm

Ryzen 7 System:

CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 1700X
MOBO: Asus ROG Crosshair VI Hero AMD X370
RAM: Team Group Night Hark LED 16GB PC24000C16 (2 Sets for 32GB Total)
GPU: ASUS STRIX-GTX1080 A8G Gaming
CASE: Phanteks Enthoo Primo
PSU: XFX XTR Black Edition 1250W 80 Plus Gold Modular
SSD: Samsung 960 EVO Polaris 500GB M.2 2280 PCI-e 3.0 x4 NVMe
COOLING:

• 
  Phanteks Glacier C350I CPU Water Block Acrylic Cover RGB LED
  Phanteks Glacier GTX 1080/1070 GPU Full Water Block Asus Strix RGB Lighting
  XSPC EX360 120mm Radiator
  XSPC D5 Photon 270 Reservoir/Pump Combo
  Associated fittings/tubing/coolant etc

Both come to similar prices but with the AMD system I can expand the watercooling to the GPU by the saving on the board/cpu.

Personally I am still leaning towards the i7 purely due to the board...Rampage V Edition 10....is just all sorts of wow.


Am curious which way others would go....?

 

[Frazzled Flamingo]

id wait for reviews but if benchmarks are anything to go by definitely ryzen

 

[lrrelevant]

Personally I'd opt for the ryzen build. You get way better multicore for the same price. Though you should cut heavily down on that PSU. 850Watts will be all you will ever need, even if you want to go SLI. The Seasonic Prime 850Watt is cheaper, and currently THE BEST psu on the market. EVGA G3 will be way better price/performance though, and is a very lovely power supply and will not fail you. With the money saved on a G3 you should even have enough to go 1800X without spending more than with the XFX 1250W + 1700X.

Seems a no brainer to me.

 

[grana92]

For the love of your money please wait at least till the end of this week (or next week) for the actual independent testing by various youtubers (Linus, Jayztwocent, bitwit, etc..), as much as I support AMD I would wait for real life testing.

 

[rhysiam]

Rumours are that Nvidia are launching the 1080ti launching in something like 16 hours. Looks like you're going all-out on the rig, so definitely make room in the budget for that one. Certainly that would make more sense than a watercooled 1080 (non ti).

Otherwise, definitely wait for Ryzen launch reviews. It's only like two days away. Wait and see.

Couple of other things.... if you do go with Ryzen make sure you get a single 32GB kit and not two separate kits. That leaves you two slots for future upgrade, and there are some rumours floating around about Ryzen and 4 memory slots in use. They're just rumours, but anyway, it's always better to stick with one DIMM per channel if you can... and you can pretty easily.

+1 for dropping that 1250W PSU. Total overkill.

Otherwise looks great.

 

[Shaun o]

Ryzen without a doubt as it stands.

Why pay double the price for a cpu when a Ryzen cpu has more physical cpu cores eight to be exact and 16 threads
And is also cpu multiplier unlocked as a bonus.

If the 52% IPC improvement for single cpu core execution are true as Amd is quoting.

A cpu that can keep up with a Intel 6900 K cpu by Intel at half it`s price you would would be insane to pass the $500 price tag of it and giving Intel $1000 dollars for the same performance or slightly less performance don`t you think.

Though by the look of it Amd is going to run out of stock for the new Ryzen cpu`s due to such a demand of pre ordering the cpus, so we may see a slight delay after the initial release of the new Cpu`s after the 2nd of March I would think.

 

[dominic2005]

Thanks for the response so far folks. Cash won't become available until at least Thursday (then plus how ever many days it takes to convince my better half lol) so will see what has come about beginning of next week.

Re PSU: I'll admit they have always mystified me as to how much power you really need for a current spec and to be future proof, so will yeild to your knowledge there.

My other question, which I should have added as part of the OP, is re the amount of RAM. There seems to be a lot of thought that for Gaming and general use, 16GB is enough. But I was always tought you can never have too much RAM...

 

[dominic2005]

Ryzen without a doubt as it stands.

Why pay double the price for a cpu when a Ryzen cpu has more physical cpu cores eight to be exact and 16 threads
And is also cpu multiplier unlocked as a bonus.

If the 52% IPC improvement for single cpu core execution are true as Amd is quoting.

A cpu that can keep up with a Intel 6900 K cpu by Intel at half it`s price you would would be insane to pass the $500 price tag of it and giving Intel $1000 dollars for the same performance or slightly less performance don`t you think.

Though by the look of it Amd is going to run out of stock for the new Ryzen cpu`s due to such a demand of pre ordering the cpus, so we may see a slight delay after the initial release of the new Cpu`s after the 2nd of March I would think.

Not so sure about the pricing, there is only £30 difference in favour of the Ryzen, at least there is in the UK anyway.

 

[13thmonkey]

For the love of your money please wait at least till the end of this week (or next week) for the actual independent testing by various youtubers (Linus, Jayztwocent, bitwit, etc..), as much as I support AMD I would wait for real life testing.

You do know you are on a tech site? one that does more in depth reviews than 'you tubers'?

 

[rhysiam]

Thanks for the response so far folks. Cash won't become available until at least Thursday (then plus how ever many days it takes to convince my better half lol) so will see what has come about beginning of next week.

Re PSU: I'll admit they have always mystified me as to how much power you really need for a current spec and to be future proof, so will yeild to your knowledge there.

My other question, which I should have added as part of the OP, is re the amount of RAM. There seems to be a lot of thought that for Gaming and general use, 16GB is enough. But I was always tought you can never have too much RAM...

A single 1080 and any Ryzen CPU would probably run absolutely fine for years on any decent 450W PSU. For a point of reference the most Anandtech could draw at their wall for their entire system with an OC'd (and more power hungry) 4960X and OC'd 1080 was 390W at the wall... meaning around 350 form the PSU.

Obviously you want to OC and you want some additional headroom, so a 550-650W PSU might be a better pick for you. If you want the option of second GPU down the track then you could probably justify even an 850W PSU (if you end up with dual OC'd 1080tis). But unless you're really banking on SLI some time soon, you honestly might be better off just getting a nice quality 550W up front and then upgrading the PSU if you need to down the track. So many people (myself included) invest in overpowered GPUs up front just in case, and never get around to actually using it.

RE RAM. 8GB is enough, 16GB is plenty for gaming. If you want to go all-out, 32GB is fine. It's not going to hurt, but it's very unlikely to offer any tangible performance improvement either. Unless you're aiming for bragging rights, why don't you start out with 2x8GB and you can always chuck in another 2x8 set (for 32GB) or even a 2x16 set (for 48GB - provided they play happily together) if you get the inclination in future.

 

[dominic2005]

Hello. Thought I'd update and finalise this.

In the end I went the Intel route, but with almost completely different specs to what I was originally looking at.

CPU: Intel i7-7700k (Guaranteed OC 4.2 - 4.7)
MOBO: ASUS Maximus IX Formula
RAM: Corsair Vengeance LED 32GB (2x16GB) DDR4 PC4-24000C15 3000MHz
GPU: ASUS STRIX-GTX1080 A8G Gaming
CASE: In-Win 509
PSU: In-Win C900
SSD: Samsung 960 EVO Polaris 500GB M.2 2280 PCI-e 3.0 x4 NVMe
COOLING: Cooler Master V8 Version 2.0 Triple Tower (Which in hindsight I wouldn't recommend with this board due to it being an absolute cow to install)

I must admit, the build didn't go smoothly, nor did powering on the first time.

As above, installing the cooler on that mobo was a mission, due to the covering on the board, it made it very difficult to access the nuts to tighting the cooler to its standoffs. In the end I had to remove the board from the case and fit the cooler, which then made re-fitting the board difficult due to the cooler making accessing 4 of the mobo's standoffs a challange.

Then there was the memory. At first, all seemed ok, but after a few seconds in the bios it froze. I reset and the mobo generated a code 55 (memory not installed). I removed and tested each dimm on its own and at first it looked like I had been unlucky and had a dodgy dimm, so I booted with just the one installed and did some research.

I found one similar issue, which the user recitified by removing and refitting the cooler, (great, out comes the board then), and checking the standoffs were the right way round and weren't shorting some of the pathways to the memory. Thankfully they only went in one way and were correct.

Nonetheless I refitted the cooler, and after panicing with getting a code 00 (which Asus lists as unused and refuses to reveal its meaning), I knew from previous experience meant a CPU failure. However that was me being a div and forgetting to refit the CPU 4+4 power cables.

Good news is both dimms did now work, and after running several memory tests, seem to be working fine.

My only niggle is when powering on from shutdown, I get an annoying "Error in CPU fan RPM" message, and have to F1 into the bios, then exit without saving. I will start a seperate thread on that though.



Thanks for the info folks.