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Four of AMD's second-generation Ryzen CPUs have been released. These are "12nm Zen+" chips with minor changes, rather than the more significant third-generation "7nm Zen 2" chips coming later.
The CPUs are the 8-core Ryzen 7 2700X ($329) and Ryzen 7 2700 ($299), and the 6-core Ryzen 5 2600X ($229) and Ryzen 5 2600 ($199). All four come with a bundled cooler, 2 threads per core, and support DDR4-2933 memory, up from DDR4-2666.
The Ryzen 7 2700X takes over the top spot from the Ryzen 7 1800X, and for an extra 10 W in TDP will provide a base frequency of 3.7 GHz and a turbo frequency of 4.3 GHz on its eight cores, with simultaneous multi-threading. This is an extra +100 MHz and +300 MHz respectively, going above the average limits of the 1800X when overclocked.
The 2700X also reduces the top cost for the best AM4 Ryzen processor: when launched, the 1800X was set at $499, without a bundled cooler, and was recently dropped to $349 as a price-competitor to Intel's most powerful mainstream processor. The 2700X undercuts both, by being listed at a suggested e-tail price of $329, and is bundled with the best stock cooler in the business: AMD's Wraith Prism RGB. AMD is attempting to hit all the targets: aggressive pricing, top performance, and best value, all in one go.
IPC is improved about 3% due to cache latency improvements, clock speeds are up about 6% (die sizes and transistor counts are similar to the previous generation, but more unused silicon is used as a thermal buffer), and Precision Boost 2 / XFR 2 is used, for a total of about 10% better performance.
Also at Tom's Hardware and PC World.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Friday April 20 2018, @10:38PM
I ended up with an MSI SLI PLUS x370 board last year due to similar complaints. It still has some of the RGB fanciness but it wasn't targeted at gamers, so it has a bit less flash and better value for the cost. There were some decent options in the b350 boards too, but those were midrange boards with fewer features and missing some things I wanted, like an extra PCI-e 16x slot I could use for GPU passthrough. MSI also has had a better track record than some (ASUS, Gigabyte, ASRock) with regard to Linux support, which was important to me.
The only down side I've noticed is that MSI is generally the last one to put out new BIOS updates, which really hurt the first 4-5 months of Ryzen's launch. In their defense, however, it seems the delays have been due to extra work and testing on each BIOS. The other makers were pushing out a lot of buggy features ASAP and causing grief for users, while the MSI releases lagged a few weeks and ended up stable. Frankly, I prefer the slower releases; the "release fast, fix later" agile development mindset is a bad fit for the most important parts of a working system IMO.