AMD 2nd Gen Ryzen Review: 2700X And 2600X Deliver More Performance Per Dollar

Test System Configuration Notes: When configuring our test systems for this article, we first made sure all firmware was up to date, then we entered their respective system BIOSes / UEFI and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High performance" defaults. We then saved the settings, re-entered the BIOS and set the memory frequency to the maximum officially supported speed for the given platform (without overclocking). The SSDs were then formatted, and the latest build of Windows 10 Pro x64 was installed.

AMD Wraith Prism And G.SKILL SniperX RAM In The Gigabyte X470 Aorus Gaming 7 WiFi

When the Windows installation was complete, we fully updated the OS, and installed all of the drivers necessary for our components. Auto-Updating and Windows Defender were then disabled, and we installed all of our benchmarking software, performed a disk clean-up, and cleared any temp and prefetch data. Finally, we enabled Windows Quiet Hours and let the systems reach an idle state before invoking a test.

Note that all platforms were fully updated and patched, including mitigations for Spectre and Meltdown, as of April 15, 2018.

HotHardware's Test Systems Intel and AMD - Head To Head

Preliminary Testing with SiSoft SANDRA 2017 Synthetic Benchmarks

We began our testing with the latest version of SiSoftware's SANDRA 2017, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran four of the built-in sub-system tests that partially comprise the suite with Intel's latest processors (CPU Arithmetic, Multimedia, Cache and Memory, and Memory Bandwidth). All of the scores reported below were taken with the CPUs running at their default settings, with 16GB of DDR4 RAM running at 2933MHz, in dual-channel mode Gigabyte Aorus X470 Gaming 7 WiFI motherboard.

Processor Arithmetic - Ryzen 7 2700X	Multi-Media - Ryzen 7 2700X
Memory Bandwidth - Ryzen 7 2700X	Cache and Memory - Ryzen 7 2700X

Processor Arithmetic - Ryzen 5 2600X	Multi-Media - Ryzen 5 2600X
Memory Bandwidth - Ryzen 5 2600X	Cache and Memory - Ryzen 5 2600X

The AMD Ryzen 7 2700X and Ryzen 5 2600X put up relatively strong numbers in all of the SiSoft SANDRA tests we ran. Relative to the original Ryzen processors, these latest chips obviously take the lead thanks to their higher clocks, more sophisticated boost algo, and lower latency characteristics. Memory bandwidth at 2,933MHz is just north of 33GB/s with both processors, but as we'll show you a little later in the overclocking section, this number can be increased significantly with some tweaking.

We also used SANDRA to do some clock-for-clock comparisons between the Ryzen 7 2700X and Ryzen 7 1800X in an attempt to prove out AMD's claims of lower memory and cache latency with the new 2nd Gen Ryzen processors. For these tests, we disabled Cool And Quiet and locked the all-core CPU multiplier to 40, for a steady 4GHz clock speed. We then manually set the memory speed to 2933MHz as well. Though both processors were tested on the exact same motherboard with identical settings and RAM, the Ryzen 7 2700X showed a marked improvement in memory latency.
Looking specifically at cache latency, there are also improvements nearly across the board. The L1 cache results are on-par with one another, but the Ryzen 7 2700X's L2 cache performed slightly better. The L3 cache on AMD's latest processors, however, showed a big advantage over the original Ryzen 7 1800X.
If we tunnel a little deeper into the results, it looks like latency with the the Ryzen 7 2700X is improved most significantly with larger data sets. The two lines diverge at the 1MB mark and from there on out the Ryzen 7 2700X's latency characteristics are better than the first-gen Ryzen.

Geekbench Synthetic CPU Testing

In the GeekBench test, we're stressing only the CPU cores in a system (not graphics or GPU architecture), with both single and multi-threaded workloads. The tests are comprised of encryption processing, image compression, HTML5 parsing, physics calculations and other general purpose compute processing workloads.

Intel's processors have a per-core performance advantage here, thanks to their architectural differences that improve IPC somewhat and their higher-clocks, And that single-thread advantage factors out into a lead in the multi-threaded tests as well. That said, the Threadripper clearly tops the charts in the MT test, due to its higher core count. In terms of single-thread performance among the AMD processors, however, the 2nd Gen Ryzen processors finish strong versus their counterparts.

PCMark 10 System Level Benchmark

Next, up we have some full-system testing with PCMark. We're representing all tests from the PCMark 10 benchmark suite, including the Essentials, Productivity, Digital Content Creation and and total PCMark score. The Essentials test covers workloads like web browsing, video conferencing and app start-up times, while Productivity tests everyday office apps from spreadsheets to word processing. Finally, Digital Content Creation tests performance of a machine with respect to photo and video editing, as well as rendering and visualization workloads.
The AMD Ryzen 7 2700X and Ryzen 5 2600X performed very well in PCMark 10. It is only in the Digital Content Creation portion of the benchmark that the Intel Core i7-8700K has an edge. In the overall score, Productivity, and Essentials tests, the 2nd Gen Ryzen processors come out on top.