The long wait is finally over: AMD has released the next generation of Ryzen processors and their Navi GPU, and for once I'm actually glad that AMD has yet to respond to my flurry of "Hey gurl, u up?" emails begging for sponsorship. There's a ton of new products up for review and benchmarking, and independent reviewers such as Gamers Nexus and the like have been working hard around the clock to get results out to the public to help the consumer understand what to buy. Let's take a quick look at what these new products mean for gamers, and, more importantly, regular gamers without the spare change to have the absolute top-of-the-line parts.
The true star of the show of the big 7/7 launch is the new processor lineup. The third generation of Ryzen on the Zen 2 architecture is no joke, showing off insane performance gains for the generational-upgraded parts and introducing new 12-core (and beyond) at the top end, because I'm sure someone, somewhere could actually use that.
Conveniently useful chart courtesy of extremetech.com
The most interesting part here is probably the 3600, replacing the extremely popular 2600 (Which I personally own) as the "mid range" chip. Gamers Nexus started their coverage of the new series of CPUs with the 3600 instead of showing off how well the 3900X beats Intel's top-of-the-line part (Spoiler alert: it pretty much does, usually). Their reason: it's an incredible processor, at $200 coming close to the performance of its competitor the $250 Intel Core i5-9600k and beating the heavily-discounted-to-$270 AMD R7 2700X (The flagship of the previous Ryzen generation) in most gaming scenarios. This really shows off the improvements in the Zen 2 architecture over last generation, as it's not very common for a new gen's mid-range to dethrone the previous gen's flagship. It's important to note, of course, that the 2700X's higher core count has it pulling ahead still in some workstation applications such as Blender and Adobe Premier. As a counterpoint: those differences are marginal, and $70 is not. So what we are left with is a $200 part that games better than anything offered last-gen, performs multi-cored workloads such as video editing almost as well as the old champ, while being extremely better at handling heat.
There's no other way to say it: if you're putting together a new gaming computer and you're operating within a budget that most of us regular people will have: buy this CPU.
The other big release is the long-awaited Radeon RX 5700 and 5700 XT graphics cards, powered by the new Navi architecture, and things get a little more complicated here. Let's first look at the more powerful of the two: the 5700 XT. The card is good. Very good. It performs roughly on par with the Nvidia RTX 2070, a $500 card, while sitting at a $400 price point (After AMD slashed the price down from $450). The $350 non-XT model performs more closely in line with the Nvidia 2060 Super and non-Super models, while being, once again, a good chunk cheaper. When looking at 1080p gaming, and even 1440p and some 4k, the XT card looks to be the new king of the mid-high range. It's an absolute powerhouse and nothing comes close to it at $400. Hell, even the Radeon VII released five months ago, at $700, loses to it in a lot of instances. There's not a whole lot to expand on that... except that the proprietary AMD card, the only one that exists as of now, uses a blower-style cooler.
This means that one turbine fan pushes air throughout the chassis of the card, as opposed to the more common and favorable downdraft cooler where fans blow cool air onto a heatsink. The blower style fans... blow. Typically, the fan runs a lot higher (and louder) to achieve the same (or often, lower) temperatures. Weather it be for cost-savings or to achieve the sleek look, or both, AMD went with this style cooler and it's disappointing. The popular rumor is that AIB partners such as Sapphire will have their own 5700 and 5700 XT models coming sometime in August, and once those are in the wild I can absolutely recommend these cards. This card under a better cooler will be, for me, a no-brainer. Nvidia did just release its new Super models of the 2060 and 2070 (with 2080 on the way), however the marginal increase in performance over Navi versus Nvidia's much higher cost does not scale. You get more frames, but you pay disproportionately more for them. And when we're talking an average of 100+ FPS in 1440p and way more FPS in 1080p across many games, it just doesn't matter anymore.
For the average Joe 1080p gamer looking for a solid 60 FPS in any game, you really don't have to look much higher than something like an AMD RX 580 or an Nvidia 1660, as both are great, cheaper cards capable of a perfect 1080p experience. But if you wanna look for the "Highest end of the mid range," or are simply looking to future-proof your build with some degree of certainty, check out the lineup of 5700 cards when third-parties release them sometime next month.
