We test our fair share of gaming desktops here at Tom’s Guide, and pretty much all of them feature one of Intel’s Core i series of CPUs. That’s about to change.
AMD has released its Ryzen processors, built on its “Zen” architecture, to take on Intel in the enthusiast, professional and gaming markets.
While no pre-built systems with Ryzen have landed in our labs just yet, you can still get a taste of how a Ryzen CPU will affect your gaming when compared to a chip from Intel. Our friends at our sister site Tom’s Hardware built their own computers with the new Ryzen 7 1800X GPU to see how it handles gaming(to see even more granular benchmarks, including detailed settings changes and number of other variables in their review, here).
AMD has also released three other series of chips: Ryzen 3, Ryzen 5 an, on the more powerful end of the spectrum, the crazy-powerful Ryzen Threadripper. You can see a test of a system with Threadripper here.
For these tests, a Ryzen 7 1800X CPU was paired with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 GPU to avoid graphics bottlenecks and were compared to Intel’s Core i7-6900K and i7-7700K with the same GPU.
Hitman
On the Hitman benchmark, the desktop with a Ryzen 7 1800X reached 91.7 frames per second, while the i7-6900K config and i7-7700K build rendered at 105.3 fps and 106.3 fps, respectively.
MORE: Gaming Desktop Buying Guide: 7 Things You Need to Know
Metro: Last Light Redux
AMD’s Zen architecture was more competitive when it came to the Metro: Last Light benchmark. The 1800X rendered at 91 fps, just a tad below the Core i7-6900K (93.7 fps) and the Core i7-7700K (93.8 fps).
Ashes of the Singularity
The Ryzen 7 1800X fell farthest in the benchmark for the real-time strategy game Ashes of the Singularity. It ran at 61 fps, falling behind the Core i7-7700K (84.7 fps) and Core i7-6900K (95.8 fps).
Productivity
Our sister site Anandtech ran some performance benchmarks on builds with the Ryzen 7 1800X and Intel Core i7-6900K. While Ryzen didn’t fare as well for gaming, it definitely holds up in productivity.
| Test | Ryzen 7 1800X | Intel Core i7-6900K |
| Cinebench 15 Singlethreaded | 161 points | 155 points |
| Cinebench 15 Multithreaded | 1,628 points | 1,477 points |
| Blender Render | 296.5 seconds | 294.3 seconds |
| PCMark 8 Home (non-OpenCL) | 3,806 points | 3,920 points |
| PCMark 8 Work (non-OpenCL) | 3,620 points | 3,171 points |
| Google Octane 2.0 on Chrome 36 | 33,505 points | 34,785 points |
Ryzen pulled ahead of Intel on Cinebench 15, which measures CPU graphics performance, and it edged out the Core i7 chip on the Blender Render test. AMD’s latest CPU split with Intel on PCMark 8’s two tests but fell behind on Chrome Octane.
