Earlier this week, AMD officially revealed the first three desktop processors from its new Ryzen family: the Ryzen 7 1800X, the Ryzen 7 1700X, and the Ryzen 7 1700. The CPUs were introduced during a special event for the press, but AMD also invited professional overclockers to come in and push the new Ryzen processors to their limits. The result was one team overclocking the 1800X to a hefty 5.2GHz with all eight cores active.
However, the team didn’t overclock the chip using mere CPU coolers. According to team member Rodrigo Avelino, they used liquid nitrogen (LN2) and lots of voltage. Thus, thanks to the pushed speed and the -200 Celsius temperature, the Ryzen 7 1800X managed to score a 2,449cb in Cinebench R15, breaking the previous world record of 2,410cb. The core voltage reached 1.875 volts while the core speed hit an exact 5,201.07MHz.
As a refresher, here are the out-of-the-box specs for the Ryzen 7 1800X and its two siblings:
| 1800X | 1700X | 1700 | |
| Code name: | Summit Ridge | Summit Ridge | Summit Ridge |
| Architecture: | Zen | Zen | Zen |
| Socket type: | AM4 | AM4 | AM4 |
| Core count: | 8 | 8 | 8 |
| Thread count: | 16 | 16 | 16 |
| Base speed: | 3.6GHz | 3.4GHz | 3.0GHz |
| Boost speed: | 4.0GHz | 3.8GHz | 3.7GHz |
| L2 Cache: | 4MB | 4MB | 4MB |
| L3 Cache: | 16MB | 16MB | 16MB |
| Max power draw: | 95 watts | 95 watts | 65 watts |
| Price: | $500 (no cooler) | $400 (no cooler) | $330 (with cooler) |
| Availability: | March 2 | March 2 | March 2 |
As the specs show, the 1800X has a base speed of 3.6GHz and a boost speed of 4.0GHz, thus the overclocking team pushed the chip way past its normal overclocking boundaries. All three processors are unlocked, enabling customers to crank the speeds beyond their limits, and could see even faster speeds than this week’s new Cinebench R15 world record using lots more liquid nitrogen and even liquid helium.
The big deal here is that right out of the box, AMD’s Ryzen 7 1800X processor provides the same if not better performance than competing eight-core CPUs sold by Intel costing $1,000 or more. The company demonstrated during its Ryzen coming-out party that the $400 Ryzen 7 1700X matched Intel’s Core i7-6900K chip, which currently still costs $1,089 despite the Ryzen reveal.
Here’s a chart to show the difference between the AMD chips and their closest Intel competitors:
| Ryzen 7 1800X | Core i7-6900K | Ryzen 7 1700X | Core i7-6800K | Ryzen 7 1700 | Core i7-7700K | |
| Core count: | 8 | 8 | 8 | 6 | 8 | 4 |
| Thread count: | 16 | 16 | 16 | 12 | 16 | 8 |
| Base speed: | 3.6GHz | 3.2GHz | 3.4GHz | 3.4GHz | 3.0GHz | 4.2GHz |
| Boost speed: | 4.0GHz | 3.7GHz | 3.8GHz | 3.6GHz | 3.7GHz | 4.5GHz |
| Cache: | 20MB | 20MB | 20MB | 15MB | 20MB | 8MB |
| Max power draw: | 95 watts | 140 watts | 95 watts | 140 watts | 65 watts | 91 watts |
| Price: | $500 | $1,089 | $400 | $441 | $330 | $350 |
Not only is AMD going after Intel with a doubled-performance-per-price-point offer, the company is also packing more performance per watt. As seen above, the 1800X achieves higher clock speeds but consumes less power than Intel’s chip at half the cost. That said, Ryzen has seemingly raised the bar for benchmarking CPUs in Cinebench R15.
