Gadgetory

welcome back to hardware unbox we know that all of you guys are super eager to see what amy has in store for you with third gen rising and the good news is our review isn't too far away in fact in just a few days time we will have a full performance breakdown for you but before that I just wanted to take the time and recap the Rison journey so far and just have a look at how the ecosystem has evolved over the course of two years so let's go back to first gen risin which launched in March of 2017 and shook up the desktop CPU landscape for the first time in a long time on March 2nd AMD Unleashed their new Rison 7 lineup which consisted of the horizon 7 1800 X at $500 horizon 7 1700 X at $400 and the risin 7 1700 at 330 dollars all offering 8 cores and 16 threads on the am 4 platform with intel's flagship consumer desktop art at the time being a measly quad core Core i7 7700 K the fact md was providing double the cause was of course a pretty big deal but before we got a look at performance there were concerns and doubts about AMD's ability to deliver as reviews we had just struggled through the terrible AMD FX 0 where AMD often delivered high core count parts only to get smoked in basically every performance test AMD were promising a huge 52 percent improvement to IPC with zem compared to excavator but we were wondering how this will translate into real-world performance for productivity these chips were champions across the workloads we tested the chips were very impressive and beat the 7700 K in key words like Adobe Premiere and often rise and went toe-to-toe with Intel's higher core count h EDT chips while all processors were great value for productivity the 330 dollar risin 7 1700 was basically a steal for these workloads given it could be overclocked up to the level of the 1800 X in many cases however gaming performance was a bit of an issue at launch AMD in their rising presentation insisted on testing with a high end GPU at a 4k resolution which as we said in our review he isn't how you test a CPU for gaming this meant aim he was essentially masking their performance issues in gaming and when it came to actually testing the chips we were left a bit disappointed even though we did expect Rison to struggle here a bit in our initial coverage the i7 7700 k ended up around 21% faster 1080p gaming than the Rison 7 1800 X and initially there was a lot of discussion around these results I distinctly remember reviewers like gamers Nexus copying a lot of hate over these performance numbers given their words happen on risings performance I guess given it was still quite far behind Intel's performance in gaming we thought that perhaps there was some sort of configuration issue initially maybe some day one driver issues or motherboard teething problems stopping these chips from performing better in hindsight it's kind of funny looking back over all the confusion that Rosen's initial launch as it turns out the margin between Raisa and KB Lake stayed relatively consistent across the months after its launch it maybe improved a little bit from optimizations and so on but the general consensus remains that the 7700 came was a superior gaming processor interestingly now two years later is kind of a different story and Steve has a great video breaking down how the 1,800 X stacks up against the 7700 K in modern titles the key thing to note here is that while the 1800 X didn't really improve much in older games newer titles began to utilize rise and more effectively and started utilizing more than four cores and eight threads betweens in a lot of demanding games the 1800 X is actually now faster than the 7700 K so there's certainly been an interesting if gradual change to how these CPUs have fared for gaming tasks part of the reason games are using more than four cores can be attributed to Intel's response to Rison later in 2017 the company launched the core i7 8700 K and other coffee-like chips which increased the top core count to six cores and delivered better performance again in productivity tasks first generation 7 still competes strongly with the 8700 K given it has 8 cores compared to 6 but the gap adil close up and for any workloads that were single threaded or heavily used AVX the 8700 K did be rising and then for gaming daily 700 K handily the 7700 K and managed to extend its lead over ricin which led us to call it the new gaming king meanwhile or actually a little before Intel's new coffee like chips AMD did launch what would become the best of the rise in lineup risin five and in particular the $220 rise in five 1600 for this low price AMD was offering a CPU that often beat or came very close to beating the core i7 7700 K in for activity workloads and while it suffered from the same gaming drawbacks as the rise in seven CPUs it wasn't that much slower in games at the time and definitely held its own against Intel similarly priced Core i5 s again Intel return served with the core i5 8400 unlocked 6 core 6 thread part which defeated the risin 5 1600 in gaming for a lower price while falling a bit behind in productivity while this part was a good deal at the time it was almost impossible to buy one at the MSRP four months which heard its value proposition this allowed me to jump on board with some price cuts and keep the 1600 firmly in front of mainstream gamers buying decisions personally I jumped on board as arise in 7 1700 early adopter within the first month of its release and it was a fairly rocky start there were issues like unstable software particularly BIOS updates for motherboards as vendors work through some of the problems with the initial launch memory support was always a bit dodgy and could vary a bit depending on the CPU and motherboard you got certainly Intel CPUs were compatible with much higher memory speeds in fact motherboard quality in general for the first three iterations wasn't amazing as I think many OEMs decided not to focus a lot of resources on AMD platforms given Intel was still what people were buying it's pretty crazy to see how far we've come going from X 372 X 570 all the big vendors this time around have top-notch boards with beefy vrm designs because enthusiasts are now buying plenty of AMD chips and plenty of AMD boards to go with it anyway aside from my early issues with rice and the performance I was achieving for the price was phenomenal and the 1700 was the perfect combination of productivity performance and gaming performance for my needs it was just as fast at video encoding as expensive Intel h EDT offerings and for me as a 34 40 by 1440 gamer not 1080p with CPU limits are a big issue right while gaming performance compared to Intel was a bit of a non-issue in April of 2018 AMD launched second gen Rison based on Zen plus and built on 12 nanometer technology rather than staggering the launch AMD pushed out Rison 7 and Rison 5 CPUs in a simplified lineup on the same date with lower prices horizon 720 700 X at 330 dollars horizon 7 2700 at $300 horizon 520 600 X 230 dollars and the Rison 5 2600 at $200 as for performance 2nd gen Rison largely delivered three things a small but serviceable increase to CPU clock speeds improved latency for small improvements to gaming performance and support for higher frequency memory the story didn't change a whole lot thanks to these improvements the areas where Rison was strong like productivity performance got a bit stronger and Rison was able to offer better value than Intel in this segment while with gaming a 7 percent improvement looking in the 2700 X versus the 1800 X meant that it still fell behind the 7700 K and 8700 K on average of course later in 2018 Intel did respond again with the kora 999 hundred K bringing 8 cores and 16 threads to their mainstream desktop platform for the first time with Intel now having core parity with AMD Intel's ability to their CPUs at up to 5 gigahertz compared to the low 4 gigahertz range Verizon meant that the 9900 K was faster than the 2700 X across the board but like with first generation second generation continued to deliver in one key area and that was value while the 9900 K was priced at over $500 at launch and continues to be around $500 to this day AMD was able to offer decent performance for several hundred dollars less particularly in the back half of 2018 the rise in seven 2700 was often available for just 250 dollars making it a really competitive option in terms of value better than that were once again the rise in five CPUs in fact for much of 2018 with Intel CPUs facing shortages especially with the popular Core i5 8400 second gen rise in five CPUs were by far the best option for mid-range and entry level gaming PC builds while the Rison 5 2600 launched at $200 it was available for 170 dollars as early as July 2018 and sales dropped that to an insane a hundred and fifty dollars on a regular basis and of course while all of this was happening we had thread rip and ap used occupying the top and bottom ends of the market often delivering highly competitive performance at great prices as well but I guess if I talked about all this Brooks as well including the 2950 ex which I personally use for video editing would be here for quite a lot longer so in reflection over the last few years I think Rison has been largely quite impressive Andy has gone from being thoroughly uncompetitive in CPUs to offering products that are actually worth buying for a good year and a half until Intel responded with the acquire nine ninety nine hundred came and beheld their performance productivity crown for mainstream desktop processes in most workloads and delivered excellent value across the board especially with Rison 5 we've also come a long way with some of the issues Rison had almost all the early adopter issues and non existent today memory support is fine and second generation can support high frequency memory there are no stability issues and I think we've all come to accept the position that AME holds in gaming has fine for many use cases while Reisen does still lose at 1080p gaming with the high end GPU for those playing at 1440p or with me range GPUs even rise in five CPUs deliver a great experience at a fantastic price in modern titles motherboard quality is also improved and it looks like we're getting the best generation yet with the upcoming x5 70 on top of that many people have figured out ways to tweak memory performance with older Rison products discretes at the last few drops and finally the promise of a m4 upgradability seems to be a definite reality with older boards continuing to support their generalising processes today but for all the good things Rison has brought there are still some areas AMD has to improve in the Quran I 9900 K is the fastest mainstream desktop chip on the market for both productivity workloads and gaming amy has loved to offer strong productivity performance and I think this is one area they'll be looking to reclaim the crown with third gen Rison and higher core parts down the line amy has also suffered a bit in AVX workloads but again AMD a promising architectural improvements with their gen rise in to tackle this the big question of course will be gaming performance will third generations architectural changes allow these CPUs to produce gaming performance that matches productivity performance will dbt Intel CPUs in gaming or come close to beating it how these chips fare here I think will be a huge talking point given the historic weaknesses of Rison in this area the other area of interest to me will be value especially given how cheap second gen rice and processes are these days while launch prices between third gen and second gen are very similar I'm curious as to whether the performance games will match the price increase relative to today's lower prices and over the next few months how available will these CPUs be and will they receive discounts like second gen especially for hot products like risin 5 so very interesting times ahead don't forget to subscribe to catch our rising 3000 series review in the next few days it's the one you've been waiting for consider supporting us on patreon we really appreciate the support of everyone who contributes to us directly through there and I'll catch you in the next one