Level1 Throwback: Revisiting Ryzen 1, Six Years Later!

When Ryzen first came out in 2017, it marked a huge shift in AMD's strategy. Wendell checks out how it holds up against modern CPUs, and if early adopters are truly getting the most bang for their buck!

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[GewelReal]

Can't believe it's been 6 years already... Still feels like it was yesterday

[greensleeves]

AM4 was sooo fun!! It’s mass compatibility made it so easy to upgrade and swap parts. I swear, I went through 3 or 4 ‘Theseus’ 🚢 PCs due to upgrading and swapping parts on my personal PC. I’ve traded parts countless of times with friends, family, and strangers on the market places. I have very fond memories of pc building due to AM4. Hopefully AM5 will be just as epyc as AM4.

[llortaton]

I love this! My home is running 6 ryzen chips! from 4 different generation and they can all run on the same board if i wanted, great until the very end.

[jamesthomas]

I have a launch day 1800X running on that same Tomahawk MB with 64GB of 2666 RAM. It was a fantastic upgrade for me at the time since I was running huge simulations for work and it was so much cheaper than the Intel high core count options, and so much faster than the i7-6700 that I was using for that at the time. Nowadays I don't really need that much performance so it remains completely adequate. Of course I have the upgrade itch and have contemplated the 5800X3D CPU swap, but I'll probably just wait until Zen 5. Nice to see verification that I could drop in a 5800X3D if a crazy deal presents itself.

[wertacus]

I got on the bandwagon with the 2600x and I've moved through a few other processors and two boards. I had a phase where I was buying amazon return pcs at auction and swapping the best parts to my rig, selling the rest. Pretty happy with my 5900x now and feel no need to upgrade. Thanks Wendell!

[kennethmadsen]

I got a 1700 on launch and still use it today (with a 1080, no less). So this is very relevant!

[guilhermegoncalves]

Still rocking my R5 1600x with my early B350 MSI since 2017. Great platform.

[mordacain]

I rocked my 1700X for quite a long time. Over-clocked to 4 Ghz and just left it there for the entire time I used. Initially I wasn't very impressed (coming from an i5 2500k OC'd to 4.2Ghz) but once I upgraded to a 1080 it started to stretch it's legs a bit on newer games. I also wound up building multiple generations of Ryzen for the family's PCs (though everyone is now running Zen 3 systems). I've really enjoyed watching the CPU progress since Zen's introduction after having used my i5 for nearly 6 years with no compelling reason to upgrade.

I got AM4 very early with an ASRock x370 Fatal1ty and an 1800X. Then got a smoking deal on a 3600XT. It's been a fun ride. Now getting ready to jump onto AM5, going ASRock again with their x670e Steel Legend, and probably a 7900X3D. Both platforms shine their best with quality memory, its more expensive but i believe its a crucial aspect for long lasting Ryzen builds. Love the channel!

[bgtubber]

My 2nd encounter with an AMD CPU since the Athlon/Duron days was the 16-core Threadripper 1950x. It was comprised of two 8-core chiplets. It ran OK with DDR4-3200 RAM and I overclocked it to 3.9 Ghz. It was a great workstation.

[davidreagan]

What great timing for this video...My first (and last) AMD build is still my current workstation, a Ryzen 5 1600x on a B350. It has performed flawlessly for almost exactly five years since I built it in early 2018. I remember the launch of Ryzen, watching closely to see how things shook out, and then buying into the platform a year later. Coupled with a RX590, it functions great for my app/gaming needs even all of these years later. To your point, I was thinking just the other day that the used market is really full of good value on newer series AM4 CPUs that will slot right into my current mb/RAM/gpu config and provide me another 5+ years of good performance. Wow, six years since the release of that architecture. It is crazy it to think its been that long. Great content my friend and a wonderful walk down memory lane for what I think turned out to be an excellent investment for so many of us! :)

[wyattarich]

This is a very valuable video. Thanks, Wendell!

[XMorbius]

Very similar to my setup from 2017, an 1800X with 1080 Ti on an Aorus AX370-Gaming K7. Upgraded the processor to a 3800X and the GPU to a 3080. Motherboard still holding strong to this day! This video was fun to watch.

[djtribo]

Great vid Wendell! Still rocking my 1700! 🙂

[grintharke]

Replaced my dedicated streaming PC which was an i5-6500 with the 1800x and HOLY smokes! Using x264 I could stream 1080p 60FPS and it was beautiful, and only used about 50% of the CPU. Such a great chip.

[louiestonanto]

Was an early adopter myself. Last November I upgraded from my trusty 1700 to a 5700x. I currently do mostly encoding so the 5800X3D wasn’t really the best upgrade for me. Will eventually replace the board when I upgrade my 1080ti to a pcie 4/5 card but at the current gpu market it seems there aren’t good value video cards so it might still take some time lol. Even had the same X370 board you showed here (MSI X370 SLI plus.) Early AM4 boards had m.2, budget Skylake boards didn’t even have those which make those platforms useless in the secondhand market even as a backup PC. AM4 is the GOAT platform

[bergamMNE]

I used 1700x for 6 years, next week I am upgrading to 5950x. It's gonna be hard to beat longevity of the AM4 platform.

[Gideonic]

Great video! As a B350 Tomahawk user (going from 1700X to 3700X to 5800X3D) i have to add though that you absolutely can run faster memory there.

I have 2 kits (4 dimms, 32 GBs) of 3600MT/s B-die memory running at those speeds with quite agressive custom timings. The 1700x didn't go beyond 3200Mhz, but the newer CPUs had no issues.

With the newesr BIOS it even does REBAR! (something that worked with no previous BIOS)

The only real limitation is the PCI-E 3.0 X16 port.

that doesn't stop me from enjoying either the Radeon 6800 (i bought at launch) or the RTX 3080 Ti (I recently snagged, used, during a miner's "fire sale" for heavy RT games)

[ethanwetzel]

As an early AM4 adopter with a R5 1600 I OC'd to 3.9ghz I loved this dig back in time

[ElZamo]

I did exactly this. I pre ordered a Ryzen 7 1700, 16GB of 2800MHz DDR4 and a x380 motherboard and got them on launch day. I remember having a coupe hiccups, like having a small heart attack when my PC wouldn't post when booting it for the first time and being stuck at 2133MHz speeds on my RAM, but that all got resolved a couple months later... then close to Christmas of 2021 I bought a Ryzen 7 5800X I got for real cheap, so I updated my BIOS and plopped that sucker in. Works like a charm.