The launch&availability date is 3. march 2017 and prices have already leaked for a couple of CPU models. To sum it up, Intel will get such a beating in terms of efficiency and price, even in the high end ;)
This was recently Tweeted by Raja Koduri (Senior Vice President and Chief Architect, Radeon Technologies Group). It seems that AMD made new coolers for the upcoming processors with RGB (or at least pink) LED lights.
It's not clear yet, which processor will get which cooler, but my guess is, that most low end 4-6-8 core processors will come with the standard 65W cooler on the left, X models (which have 95W TDP and are more overclockable) will come with the one in the middle or the one on the right.
On the other hand, these new processors have hundreds of sensors inside, which can turn off or overclock parts of the CPU quickly, so in theory any model will work with any cooler ... just a bit slower. AMD has already made this information public - the better the cooling solution, the higher the CPUs will overclock (automatically).
These are the leaked prices, which are quite impressive, even if with all the taxes they'll be about 20-30% more expensive in some countries.
Basically the $490 R7 1800X CPU will challenge Intel's top 8-10 core processors from the LGA 2011-3 enthusiast platform, for about half the price.
IMHO the R7 1700 model is more exciting, as it will come with a very low TDP and price, while running 8 cores / 16 threads at above 3.4GHz at all times.
Here are some more prices, leaked from a Chinese retailer. Prices are around 25% higher than US prices, mostly because of taxes, so keep that in mind when converting from CNY to USD:
What is amazing about the upcoming RyZen chips, is that they are 10% smaller than Intel's Kaby Lake, even though they have 2x more L2 cache and are in fact faster in some tests. Add that to the absence of iGPU on AMD processors, and you get a significant, sustainable price difference.
WCCFTECH also published leaked prices of ASUS AM4 motherboards, which will be available before the end of the month.
If you're thinking about buying a high end gaming PC with a smaller budget, you're probably looking at the 69USD motherboard, which features the most important ports and slots for a fast gaming PC.
The PCI-Express x16 slot will have 16 v3.0 lanes, which is more than enough for anything on the market at this time. 8 PCI-Express v3.0 lanes are reserved for M.2. storage and other on-board i/o devices (like LAN, audio...etc.), while 6 v2.0 lanes are probably for older I/O controllers like SATA-2/3, USB 2.0 ...etc.
This picture of the ASUS PRIME B350M-A mainboard was also leaked by WCCFTECH, probably during CES. Although it may suffer some small changes, there are some key things about it:
- no radiator on power phases
- 4+4 PIN CPU power connector
- 4xDDR4 slots
- one M.2. slot for fast SSD storage, any length supported
- one USB 3.0 header for front ports
- VGA and DVI (possibly HDMI too) ports in the back, although they cannot be used yet, as RyZen Processors don't have integrated GPUs
Equip this mainboard with a 316 USD R7 1700 processor, and you'll have Intel enthusiast level performance, for about half the price.
When it comes to the graphics card, it'll be the same price on both Intel and AMD platforms, but at least you'll have less heat issues, as the R7 1700 8c/16t processor only requires 65W of power and two sticks of RAM vs. 140W and 4 sticks on the Intel side.
Personally I'll probably wait for an even cheaper mainboard, and pair it with the cheapest AMD CPU. As a blogger and casual gamer (I currently play only DOTA 2 in the lowest detail at 1280 x 1024 resolution) I probably won't need anything more than 4 cores. Right now I'm blogging and playing on a Haswell Celeron G1820 and Intel HD Graphics, but not without 8GB DDR3-1600 and a 60GB SSD, to help with loading times and fluid gameplay ;)