E D ’ S N O T E //
STAY IN YOUR LANE
L
et’s get down to it. This is a short,
super short issue and as such
there’s no time for the usual
waffle.
So here we are in Issue 44 of the
magazine, way after Computex and E3
have ended.
What was notable is that we finally
saw a 5GHz CPU (albeit only one core
can reach this clock out the box), many
years after the 5GHZ abomination that
was the FX-9590. 5GHz has once again
proved challenging even for INTEL, but
this attempt has faired better,
at least if you measure
it in performance, not
necessarily all core
clock frequency. While
the AMD CPU could
operate at 5GHz across
all eight cores, the
performance was
inferior to what was
available at 3.8 to 4GHz
on the Core i7 of the
time.
With the 8086K we have
a CPU that rarely reaches 5GHz
without manual tuning, but obviously
offers the best gaming performance
money can buy. Add de-lidding to the
mix (not sure how the relevant parties
at INTEL feel about this practice, but
the benefits are just far too great to
pass on) and you have one hell of a
CPU that will easily do 5GHz+ all day at
lower than default CPU VID.
That said, now is also a great time to
address an issue regarding AMD Ryzen
7 reviews. It turns out that there is
some testing inconsistency (if the
quality of reviews over the last few
years hasn’t made that obvious) and
some of it may be due to how reviewers
are instructed to evaluate CPUs.
The long and the short of it is that,
most boards or at least the useful ones
(let’s not pretend every vendor has
useful boards, it’s a hit and mostly
misses more times than not) have the
“Enhanced Turbo” mode which
essentially makes sure that every core
gets “boosted” to the single core turbo
frequency. This is not spec, but
something that the board vendors have
as an option evidently. When reviewing
a CPU, most reviews don’t state this,
nor do they toggle it on and off.
Obviously,
“What any one person
believes about the moral
practices of any company
has nothing to do with the
CPUs or GPUs they produce.”
that setting gives drastically different
results when evaluating a CPU than
strict adherence to the specification
would.
If AMD were to suggest disabling
such features for performance
comparisons, it would be a valid
request. The issue here though is that,
virtually nobody would experience
the motherboard or the CPU in that
fashion. I understand that this is the
only way to compare CPUs directly,
but at the same time one must
acknowledge that the results would
represent a scenario that simply
wouldn’t play out in a material sense
for the most part.
If reviews all this time have been
done with the setting left at AUTO
(which is essentially enabled), to
suddenly disable this setting and
present results where the Ryzen 7
2700X is outperforming it’s INTEL
counterparts is misleading if not
specifically stated within the review.
There’s no reason to take a binary
stance on which CPU is faster as the
numbers present a far more nuanced
scenario than that. It’s more important
to state in which situation the Ryzen
or Core CPU is stronger – that’s the
point of the benchmarks. In this way
it’s possible to celebrate Ryzen based
on only what the numbers represent.
In essence, we can be adults about
it. These are complicated pieces
of silicon with a great many parts
involved and there’s enough there to
evaluate without moralizing over any
one company’s business practices and
having that skew analysis. AMD is not
out to save PC gaming
or the end user from the supposed
tyranny of INTEL or NVIDIA. They exist
to generate profits like every other
business. What any one person
believes about the moral practices of
any company has nothing to do with the
CPUs or GPUs they produce. If reviews
get clouded by each firm’s business
practices in addition to these dubious
testing methods, then reviews become
useless (as they have largely become). I
for one an overclocker first and that’s
what I love, so I stay in that lane and
evaluate components based on that
criteria. Everything else is simply noise.
- Neo Sibeko, Editor
Issue 44 | 2018 The OverClocker 03