The Haswell 4670k system-- my previous PC-- was running DDR3 memory at 1600 MHz, with the same GTX 1070 that is in use with the new, Ryzen system. The Kaby Lake numbers-- coming from the PC I built for my wife a few months ago-- are with memory at 3000 MHz, accompanied by a GTX 1080.
Also, I'm running a fast-as-lightning NVMe solid state drive with the new setup, hence why the file system scores are so immense. And my wife doesn't own copies of either "Ghost Recon: Wildlands" or "Total War: Warhammer", so I couldn't try those on her PC. Also of note, I was running "Wildlands" under Windows 10, and "Warhammer" under GNU/Linux.
| Haswell 4670k | Kaby Lake 7700k | Ryzen 5 1600 | % vs Haswell | % vs Kaby Lake | |
| Sandra CPU Multimedia (Mpix/s) | 245.91 | 457.31 | 339.75 | 38.16 | -25.71 |
| Sandra Cryptography (GB/s) | 6.567 | 8.472 | 14.499 | 120.79 | 71.14 |
| Sandra Process Financial Analysis (kOPT/s) | 18.3 | 25.63 | 31.73 | 73.39 | 23.80 |
| Sandra Processor Scientific Analysis (GFLOPS) | 15.88 | 20.65 | 21.21 | 33.56 | 2.71 |
| Sandra .NET Arithmetic (GOPS) | 27.82 | 43.26 | 52.8 | 89.79 | 22.05 |
| Sandra Memory Bandwidth (GB/s) | 17.169 | 22.702 | 35.586 | 107.27 | 56.75 |
| Sandra Cache & Memory Latency (ns) | 27.7 | 22.6 | 62.4 | 125.27 | 176.11 |
| Sandra File System Bandwidth (MB/s) | 76.558 | 147.498 | 332.914 | 334.85 | 125.71 |
| Sandra File System I/O (IOPS) | 226.7 | 206.28 | 29228.8 | 12793.16 | 14069.48 |
| Sandra GP Processing (Mpix/s) | 1915.06 | 2552.28 | 1916.03 | 0.05 | -24.93 |
| Sandra GP Cryptography (GB/s) | 70.347 | 84.147 | 71.312 | 1.37 | -15.25 |
| Sandra GP Financial Analysis (kOPT/s) | 2696.84 | 3488.43 | 2320.02 | -13.97 | -33.49 |
| Sandra GP Scientific Analysis (GFLOPS) | 852.23 | 889.38 | 860.67 | 0.99 | -3.23 |
| Sandra Media Transcode (MB/s) | 10.264 | 10.93 | 7.72 | -24.79 | -29.37 |
| Sandra GP Bandwidth (GB/s) | 46.148 | 52.856 | 46.848 | 1.52 | -11.37 |
| Sandra GP memory Latency (GB/s) | 139.8 | 132.5 | 142.5 | 1.93 | 7.55 |
| Sandra Overall Score (kPT) | 14.14 | 20.94 | 23.94 | 69.31 | 14.33 |
| 3dMark Time Spy Overall | 5201 | 6793 | 5976 | 14.90 | -12.03 |
| 3dMark Time Spy Graphics | 5795 | 7132 | 5990 | 3.36 | -16.01 |
| 3dMark Time Spy CPU | 3291 | 5355 | 5899 | 79.25 | 10.16 |
| 3dMark Fire Strike Overall | 12826 | 17212 | 15233 | 18.77 | -11.50 |
| 3dMark Fire Strike Graphics | 17362 | 20793 | 18150 | 4.54 | -12.71 |
| 3dMark Fire Strike Physics | 7364 | 14362 | 16028 | 117.65 | 11.60 |
| 3dMark Fire Strike Combined | 6947 | 8634 | 6704 | -3.50 | -22.35 |
| Total War: Warhammer 1080p Ultra (fps) | 83.3 | N/A | 76.6 | -8.04 | N/A |
| Total War: Warhammer 2160p Ultra (fps) | 34.2 | N/A | 33 | -3.51 | N/A |
| Ghost Recon: Wildlands 1080p Ultra (fps) | 50.51 | N/A | 49.6 | -1.80 | N/A |
| Ghost Recon: Wildlands 1080p Medium (fps) | 96.22 | N/A | 95.05 | -1.22 | N/A |
| Ghost Recon: Wildlands 2160p Ultra (fps) | 24.02 | N/A | 23.73 | -1.21 | N/A |
| Ghost Recon: Wildlands 2160p Medium (fps) | 41.39 | N/A | 40.42 | -2.34 | N/A |
A few interesting observations:
- POSTer child: I had to pop the CMOS battery just to get the motherboard to POST. I haven't seen anything this unstable since the 90s!
- Good timing: True to MSI's compatibility list, my RAM is indeed totally stable at 3200 MHz-- after flashing to the latest BIOS of course! Similarly, overclocking the CPU to match the 1600x's 3600 MHz was a piece of cake. Incidentally, the above benchmarks are at 3600 MHz.
- Cool customer: After dealing with my wife's Kaby Lake, which runs hotter than hell even at stock speeds with a fancy cooler, this Ryzen chip is cool as a cucumber-- it hovers in the high 30 C range idle, and in the 60s C with all of the cores fully loaded! I suspect there is a lot of overclocking headroom I can achieve here.
- Funky mama: Not since the 90s, where I was swapping AGP drivers and BIOS revisions faster than James Bond swaps sex partners, have I had to do this much tinkering with a PC-- and I'm loving it! For example, under GNU/Linux I had to run a "sudo cpupower frequency-set -g performance", and under Windows I had to install AMD's custom Ryzen power profile, to get optimal performance.
- Schizophrenic: In another nod to the era of zubaz and Power Rangers, the software is emerging as I type-- talk about immature! Synthetic benchmarks show my $220 CPU outclassing my wife's $350 processor-- yet when it comes to games, and specifically Nvidia's video drivers, my Haswell PC was faster! It all points to the software, man!
- Too soon: Games are so immensely GPU bound, that now I see there wasn't much of a point to me upgrading yet. Even as the Ryzen performance profile revisions, scheduler tweaks, and engine optimizations undoubtedly will continue to fly in, I just don't think that gaming alone makes this a worthwhile move. But, it is fun watching Manjaro Linux boot instantly, thanks to the CPU and SSD (GRUB, then a screen flash, then Xorg-- happened so fast the first time that I was sitting there waiting for something to happen!).