AMD Ryzen 7 1700X Score Surfaces In SANDRA Benchmarks Taking On Intel Kaby Lake

The leaks surrounding AMD's not-yet-released Ryzen processor family are coming in fast and furious, with only weeks to go before launch. In just the past week alone we've seen what is supposed to be AMD's full Ryzen lineup spanning 17 SKUs, along with core/thread counts and TDP ratings for each chip. In some cases we've even seen clock speeds and pricing info. Now we can add Ryzen benchmark scores from SiSoftware's official ranking database for its SANDRA suite.

SANDRA (System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is a popular program that has been in active development for many years. It allows users to audit their system from top to bottom and sports several built-in synthetic benchmarks. We use SANDRA in many of our desktop and laptop reviews to evaluate processor performance, along with memory bandwidth, and storage. It has been a reliable metric for us throughout the years, and now it's playing the part of a crystal ball as we try to peer into Ryzen's future.


Twitter user Tech Inquisition (@InquisitionTech) responded to one of our previous articles on Ryzen and shared with us a link to a Ryzen listing in SANDRA's database. What it shows is a Ryzen 7 1700X slotting in at the No. 44 spot on a list of the top SANDRA 2015 "Processor Multi-Media" benchmarks. Running in a Windows 10 64-bit environment, it scored 435.12 Mpix/s with an average clock speed of 3.39GHz.


That places the processor ahead of several Intel Xeon E5-2600 series CPUs, and more interestingly within striking distance of Intel's Core i7-7700K Kaby Lake chip, which scored 450.91 Mpix/s. Here is how the two processors compare:

Intel's Kaby Lake part is at a core count and thread disadvantage and has half the amount of L3 cache available, compared to AMD's Ryzen 7 1700X. However, this particular Ryzen chip is clocked much lower at 3.4GHz to 3.8GHz, versus 4.2GHz to 4.5GHz for the Kaby Lake CPU.

The other thing to keep in mind here is that AMD is probably still optimizing AM4 chipset drivers, while Kaby Lake has had time to mature in the marketplace. We also don't know if the Ryzen chip is an engineering sample that might have some features disabled, or if it's even final silicon, and whether or not this particular version SANDRA supports all of its features.

Disclaimers aside, it's interesting to see how Ryzen performs, even if it's only a single benchmark. To throw more numbers into the mix, we dug up this older version of SANDRA (2015) and ran the same benchmark on a Core i7-6950X, a Broadwell-E CPU with 10 cores and 20 threads clocked at 3GHz to 3.5GHz. It also has 25MB of SmartCache and a 140 Watt TDP.


Scores in SANDRA can change from version to version and we're not sure which specific build of SANDRA 2015 this Ryzen listing appears to be taken in, so this is more for reference than an exact comparison. What we have is the Core i7-6950X scoring 460.24 Mpix/s. Folks, that's a part that streets for over $1,600 putting only a tiny bit of distance between it and an AMD Ryzen processor that will supposedly sell for under $400.

Other benchmark results that emerged over the weekend suggest that the Ryzen 7 1700X will perform similarly to Intel's Core i7-6900K. This Ryzen CPU's SANDRA score is in line with that. If that is indeed the case, it's no wonder Intel is said to be readying new Kaby Lake Core i7 and i5 processor with more aggressive pricing.