So that irony that I was talking about before.. The first PC I ever owned that wasn't a rescue from the stone age was the Acer Aspire T160, a pre-built sporting an AMD Athlon 64 3400+ 2.4Ghz. It was a capable box but that was over ten years ago, and time has not been kind to it. So having walked through the Intel sweet shop since I started this search, it's funny to find myself full circle.
Anyway I digress.
Why AMD, and with nine (soon to be fifteen) CPU's in the family to choose from, why this particular one?
With Ryzen (and the higher tier Threadripper range, which sits well beyond my needs and budget) AMD managed to effectively sideswipe Intel, who with little competition to inspire them have incrementally tick-tocked the development of consumer processors at a rate which seems to have been insultingly conservative. AMD re-crafted the architecture and brought a range of CPU's to the consumer market with core counts and multithreaded performance previously only found in the enthusiast domain. Whilst Intel can still technically claim to have the faster single core clock speed at the price, what we have with Ryzen is a range of CPU's which can still stand shoulder to shoulder with Intel's offerings AND compete mercilessly on price/performance. The flagship Ryzen 7 1800x with its 8 cores and 16 threads entered the market at a very sweet £499 compared to Intel's closest offering at the time, the Core i7 6900K, which retailed typically for around £1000. Multithreaded performance tests confirmed its ability to take on those tasks with a real zest, further refinements are smoothing out low level quirks endemic to newer platform releases and overall the Ryzen range seems to have carved a respectable place for itself. I feel I have to clarify that I'm not talking as any kind of AMD fanboy here. I would be happy with either an Intel or AMD CPU in the driving seat, and for the majority of this project time Intel did in fact hold pole position, with both X99 and Z170 platforms.
Why this particular CPU? Interestingly the Ryzen family seems to mirror Intel's nomenclature with series 3, 5 and 7, and generally speaking they carry four, six and eight core models across those categories. Balancing price against overall expected personal requirements six core, twelve thread felt about right. The leap from the nominal price of this chip (£175) to the eight core, sixteen thread 1700 (£260) was one I kept returning to - you find when assembling a PC project that the temptation is always there to go for more, but ultimately I couldn't justify it - even less so when I managed to bag my 1600 for £136. Still a reasonable upgrade path does exist, and with AMD's commitment to the platform for the next three years in concert with my consumer restraint, there's probably more than enough life in this. Another undeniable benefit is the included CPU cooler - not all models have them, but it is a welcome thing from a budgetary perspective, particularly when they turn out to be as half decent as reviewers seem to claim. It's probably not going to be in there for the whole nine yards. I don't know whether I'll stick with air cooling or move to an AIO water cooling solution down the line. I don't find myself being that interested in chasing an aggressive overclock, something about having water in a PC strikes me as a discomforting thing and to include a pump is to introduce another point of failure. Given that I'm changing up from a Yugo to a Ferrari it's not something that overly concerns me at this point. It will just be nice to be able to work better.
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