WHICH RYZEN IS RIGHT FOR YOU?

So many CPUs, but which one to pick?

AMD’s Ryzen CPUs have earned high praise since they were rst rolled out. But with a total of seven processors across the Ryzen 5 and 7 line-ups, it can be quite a challenge picking out the right CPU, especially if you’re considering Intel’s own Kaby Lake processors as well.

Ultimately, Ryzen is technologically advanced, but isn’t the fastest. It loses out to the Intel Core i7-7700K in gaming, and doesn’t quite match up to the 10-core Core i7-6950X. But sometimes “good enough” is enough for most folks, and Ryzen is generally very price competitive while offering excellent multi-threaded performance compared to Intel.

If you’re looking to build a new PC, you’re probably having a hard time deciding between AMD and Intel, which given the years-long lack of competition, is saying quite a lot.

But in a nutshell, each Ryzen chip has its own unique proposition. Here’s what you should care about.

Most bang for your buck

The Ryzen 5 1600X is particularly attractive because it is difficult to turn down 6 cores and 12 threads for its $359 price tag. What’s more, at that price, the closest Intel offering is the Core i5-7600K with just 4 cores and 4 threads. It also offers roughly 90 per cent of the performance of a Core i7-7700K while costing around two-thirds of the price, which means you’re getting a lot more performance per dollar.

In addition, it has the same base and boost clocks as the $818 Ryzen 7 1800X, which means its gaming performance isn’t even that far behind the agship Ryzen chip.

Best overclocker

But if you want Ryzen 7 1800X performance but don’t want to pay the full price, the $499 Ryzen 7 1700 will plug the gap quite nicely. Boasting over a 20 per cent performance boost after overclocking to around 3.95GHz, the 1700 even manages to outdo the stock performance of the 1800X in Cinebench R15.

The seemingly large overclocking headroom is due to the low 3.0GHz base clock, and overclocking helps unlock the full potential of the 8-core/16-thread chip.

Flagship performance on a budget

Like the Ryzen 7 1700, the 1700X is arguably a better deal than the top-end 1800X processor. It offers very similar performance to the latter, while costing over $200 less. The 1700 requires overclocking to be a serious contender, but the 1700X is perfectly ne at stock settings.

That said, it does exceed the default Cinebench score of the 1800X when overclocked to 4.0GHz as well. However, if the best possible performance in CPU-intensive tasks is not a top priority, the 1700X will do just ne for your computing and gaming needs.