Core i7 7700K vs. Ryzen 7 1800X With Ubuntu 17.04 + Linux 4.12

Given the recent BIOS improvements for Ryzen and the ever-advancing state of Linux and components like Mesa (although no recent Ryzen-specific work), here are some fresh tests of the current high-end Ryzen 7 1800X compared to an Intel Core i7 7700K on Ubuntu 17.04 with Linux 4.12 and Mesa 17.2-dev.

As a reminder, the Ryzen 7 1800X as the current high-end Zen desktop CPU until ThreadRipper, is priced at $499 USD and features eight cores / sixteen threads with a 3.6GHz base frequency and 4.0GHz turbo. The Core i7 7700K meanwhile has the high-end Kabylake desktop CPU sells for about $340 USD and is quad-core plus Hyper Threading and has a 4.2GHz base frequency with 4.5GHz turbo.

The Ryzen 7 1800X test system featured the MSI X370 XPOWER GAMING TITANIUM motherboard with its latest BIOS, 2 x 8GB DDR4-3200MHz memory now running correctly thanks to the BIOS upgrade, 525GB Crucial SSD, and a Radeon R9 Fury graphics card. The Core i7 7700K system had the same RAM, same SSD, and same graphics card while using the MSI Z270-A PRO motherboard also with its latest BIOS.

Both systems were running Ubuntu 17.04 x86_64 with upgrades to the Linux 4.12 Git kernel and Mesa 17.2-dev Git this week via the Padoka PPA. GCC 6.3 was the default compiler during testing. All of the benchmarks were automated in a reproducible manner via the Phoronix Test Suite.

First up are the Ryzen 7 1800X vs. Core i7 7700K Linux gaming tests followed by various open-source CPU benchmarks.