Gadgetory

welcome back to hard rowan boxed it was roughly a year ago from today that AMD re-entered the cpu market in a serious way with Rison and it took the enthusiast market by storm these new high-performance chips were so enticing for productivity workloads that i decided to do a full system upgrade and move across to rising from one main system which i use for video editing and better gaming you might remember the build video I did for the system back in March of 2017 if not you can check it out around here so I've been using Rison full-time for basically a year now and before second gen rising lands in the next month I wanted to do a recap of a year with Rison and give my thoughts on being an early adopter of the platform so first let's do a quick refresher on the rise in lineup as it launched throughout 2017 I'm going to ignore the new AP use as they've only just launched instead focusing on the pure CPU launches of 2017 so first up we got the 8 core 16 threat Rison seven-line in early march which offered twice the cause of intel's then quad-core cable x series and subsequently impressed with its productivity performance it's very similar price points considering all rise and cpus are unlocked and overclockable the best option here was the 329 dollar rise in seven 1700 which is very easy to overclock up to around 4 gigahertz the Rison 7 1700 X and 1800 X weren't as good value but that's only because they were overshadowed by the 1700 in April we got the rise in 5 line which consisted of the six core 12 thread Rison 5 1600 and 1600 X along with the four core eight thread Rison 5 1500 X and 1400 again due to the unlocked nature of all rising cpus the 1600 and 1400 made the most sense depending on how many cause you needed and at 170 dollars for the 1400 and 220 for the 1600 these were a really good value for pretty much everyone and later in June we got the risin for inline with four cores and four threads consisting of the Rison three 1200 and Rison three 1300 X again a bit of a theme here but the Rison 3 1200 was a great buy at 110 dollars and could be overclocked strongly from a value and performance perspective there were great buyers across the horizon three rise in five and rises seven lines and plenty of reason to choose AMD over Intel's disappointing cable ache processes this did change a bit when Intel launched six core coffee-like CPUs towards the end of 2017 the in-demand Core i5 8400 was a particularly great option but AMD still managed to hold their own against the newer Intel options and this kind of brings me to my first point about being a rise an early adopter whenever you make a purchase like this there is always the question of whether you should have just waited for the next big thing in this case Intel's coffee Lakeline which was only six to seven months away of course with any tech purchase you could have just waited for something better but in the case of coffee like while Intel's new processors were pretty damn good they didn't make me regret my rise and purchase at all and this is because of one simple thing Rison is still very competitive and a great all-around cpu particularly the Rison 7 1700 and risin 5 1600 coffee like by no means boo aimed the out of the water which is something we haven't been able to say about the intel AMD rivalry for a long time had until come out and offered orders of magnitude more performance than my rising 7 system I might have felt a bit of buyer's remorse but that didn't really happen and ended up still satisfied with Rison after watching all of Steve's benchmarked videos and of course I'd already enjoyed 6 months of excellent performance before Intel rejoined the party and I'm really happy to zng AMD's platform for another key reason with Rison - just around the corner I can think about upgrading to a faster CPU without needing to replace my motherboard AMD has kept their promise that all a m4 motherboards will be compatible with future generation of CPUs potentially up to 2020 so it's just a simple matter of a CPU swap if or when it's worth it to do so had I stuck with Intel I'd have needed to replace my motherboard to upgrade to coffee Lake and a no doubt him to do so again for the next generation the system I ended up using was slightly different to the one in the build video a bit of production and other reasons that went into that but the build video showed me using a risin 7 1700 on a gigabyte a be 350 gaming 3 motherboard but shortly after we filmed the video we swap that out for a risin 7 1700 X and Anna soos ROG crosshair 6 hero X 370 motherboard we did need to use the 1700 and B through 50 motherboard for a few other projects so we made this minor change to some other stuff we had lying around this is where the first issue I had with Rison comes in this is purely down to being a very early adopter we all heard about rise in memory issues that launched with some CPUs and motherboards doing a rather poor job of supporting the ddr4 options on the market at the time you know say for some rise and approved kits well I got stuck with what I thought was this problem with my rising system after swapping to the crosshair 6 motherboard we used 32 gig of corsair ddr4 3000 memory with the original build and it worked fine but after swapping to the crosshair 6 I could only get the system working with 2 of the 4 8 gig modules in stores and only a 2666 beds rather than the 29:33 that should have easily worked I thought this was down to the memory issues we'd heard about I did decide to wait for a few buyers and system updates to see if they would resolve the issue and these fixes did allow me to push up the memory speeds to 29 33 but I still couldn't get the full 32 gig working so obviously alarms going off there but as it turns out the crosshair 6 euro motherboard provided to us by AMD and this was the original motherboard provided to us alongside Rison 7 for our initial review that had to faulty DIMM slots it wasn't a memory compatibility or BIOS issue at all rather a problem with the first batch of motherboards I subsequently swapped back to the gigabyte a be 350 gaming 3 and I haven't had a problem since and this is one of the problems with being an early adopter in the first few months of Rison it did take a couple of months for BIOS and AMD platform updates to sort out the memory compatibility issues and the very first run of motherboards also had a couple of issues motherboard manufacturers didn't have much time to get out products for the Rison 7 launch and of course we were looking at an entirely new platform so there were going to be a few issues around that sort of launch unfortunately early adopters had to bear the brunt of these issues and that really should have been fixed pre-launch but since those issues in the early days I've had basically no problems with the platform as for overclocking I've been comfortably running at 3.9 gigahertz on my rise in seven 1700 X since launch my CPU can't quite hit four gigahertz at sensible voltages but I hear most 1700 X's and 1700 s can I'm still quite satisfied with 3.9 gigahertz anyway and I could achieve this overclock on both the X 370 crosshair 6 hero and the be 350 gigabyte a be 350 gaming 3 which is nice considering the be 350 board is a hell of a lot cheaper it's only $90 rather than $250 for the Zeus X 370 option so provided you don't choose a board with terrible V RMS or vrm cooling it sounds like a lot of be 350 boards are great for overclocking even the top-end rise and 7 CPUs and that's certainly been my experience another concern that arose around launch was rising single thread performance which is behind Intel and not exactly helped by Verizon's inability to clock higher than around 4.2 gigahertz in the best case situations admittedly I did think this may be somewhat of an issue when I upgraded to rise in but after a year using the CPU everyday it's just not a big deal at all most of the tasks I do for work which involve video editing and rendering in premiere basic web browsing document creation and Excel spreadsheet work there either all fully multi-threaded and make use of rise in the 7s 8 cause or happen fast enough that additional single Turner performance would make a negligible difference in fact the main tasks I perform in my PC that involves a lot of waiting for things to complete is video rendering which is fully multi-threaded and completes faster than an equivalently priced Intel system there just aren't that many day-to-day single threaded workloads I use which makes rise in this slightly inferior single thread performance pretty much a non-issue you definitely couldn't say this a few years back when multi-threaded was a less common thing but these days single thorough tasks are truly on their way out now of course if Rison was significantly behind Intel in single photo performance like they used to be with bulldozer it would definitely would be an issue and would harm multi-threaded tasks in the process but Rison gets close enough for me it's going to be similar for most other buyers out there plus I'm really enjoying having eight cores it's awesome for multitasking the other big story at the launch of Rison was in gaming performance when testing CPU limited gaming at 720p or 1080p Rison 7 was often a fair way behind intel's kb lake in popular tiles and this caused a lot of concern among buyers definitely a lot of discussion on our videos Rison was a great value proposition for productivity but gaming performance was disappointing and not that attractive to those building a pure gaming system in 2018 this is still somewhat the case the core i7 8700 K for example still holds a pretty solid lead over the horizon 7 1800 X in most games despite the 1,800 X outperforming the 8700 K in the number of multi-threaded productivity tests however the gap between AMD and Intel in games has closed a little bit since launch what used to be a significant gap at 1080p with something you know like a gtx 1080i has shrunk a bit there's still a gap that gives the AO 700k a lead but it's not the surprisingly large discrepancy it once was and this is down to a few things games are becoming more multi-threaded so titles released since the launch of Rison are more likely to support Rises capabilities properly and more likely to use more threads again the Intel does still hold a lead with a lot of modern games but we are seeing a trend of the gap narrowing and while very few older games received updates to help rise and performance more general updates to the platform drivers BIOS and windows and so forth have assisted gaming performance to a small degree it's not a game changer but it has helped the situation since launch and to be honest the whole situation of Intel leading in gaming performance only applies to a subsection of the gaming population those that game at 1080p or lower with the high end GPU like a gtx 1080i if you are GPU limited either through using a lower jeepers you all gaming at a higher resolution there was very little difference in performance between coffee lake and risin at least for gaming in 2018 in the future it might be a little different as games to become more CPU limited but right now you need to have a specific Hardware set up to benefit from Intel's gaming performance lead and that's sort of where my experiences with rising for gaming come in I have a tight next Pascal but I game at 34 40 by 1440 so in basically every game I'm GPU limited with this sort of syrup Rison has been fantastic for gaming I've had no issues and in general I'm not missing out on any extra performance that otherwise have from a coffee like system so even though I was a bit concerned when I first saw rise ins gaming benchmarks in actual practice with my setup I've had no issues so overall I've been really happy with my riser system it's been a great choice for video editing and day to day work and it's been very capable for high-end gaming aside from a few early adopter teething issues in the first few months it's been smooth sailing since then I'm looking forward to seeing what 2nd gen Rison brings next month I think a lot of the earlier doctor problems with the rising platform have been largely resolved and I'll have no trouble recommending Rison to buyers right now especially is it you know it continues to be good value for money for productivity and gaming workloads compared to Intel's offerings though I guess at this point you should probably wait for rise until you see what that's like anyway that's it for this recap of Rison after 12 months if you've been using rising - I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below about how it's been going for you don't forget to smash the like button and I'll catch you in the next one