Conclusion
The Ryzen 7 1800X is a very well designed CPU. It competes in a market segment with the i7-6900X and tends to perform very well in both gaming and other tasks. That is, it isn’t technically competing against the 7700K because the 1800X is meant more towards those that do and game. It provides a good medium between the absolute best gaming performance and being able to do other work as well. Rendering, compression, 3D modeling and even DNN’s are all much more suited to the Zen core and those looking for more than just a gaming CPU, the 1800X is a magnificent choice.
It’s generally better than the 6900K and also much less expensive. In terms of gaming, the Ryzen 7 series, including the 1800X, are held back by a lack of competent multi-threading in games. It’s there, but these cores are very much under-utilized and the future looks bright for having more threads available to play with. That said, the first iteration of Zen should age fairly well until Zen 2.0 can come onto the scene.
We stand by our original assessment that this is a great CPU. The 1800X won’t provide the absolute maximum frame rates possible, though they are still very high (higher than the 6900K in many or most cases) and general provides a better 99th-percentile frame rate for a more consistent experience. In other-words, when things get complex, the Ryzen 7 1800X can maintain better FPS than the competition.
But really, you have to ask yourself what your purpose is for a new CPU. Do you want to purely play games and nothing more? Do you plan on running computationally intense, multi-threaded applications? Do you want to render videos for your channel or for fun? What about streaming? More cores is quickly becoming a better solution to doing things as we multi-thread more applications, including games. Per core performance is good, but Ryzen excels in multi-threaded applications. And thus is a good choice if you love games but also want to accomplish other tasks. It doesn’t hurt that it’s actually somewhat energy efficient, too.
Ryzen is a superior CPU, and though one can find the worst way to benchmark something to show it’s weaknesses, there are plenty of strengths including how scheduling takes place to work around CCX communication latency issues. In the real-world it performs beautifully and would be a good choice for a new PC. We’re particularly excited to see Naples in the near future, because that should help to shake-up the server market with even more competition.