The day of Ryzen has finally come and while I?m sure many of you have been eagerly awaiting this, we?ve been even more excited to be some of the first people in the world to get our hands-on the new hardware and see what it can really do. There have been many leaks and lots of speculation hitting the market, and we?ve seen some cherry picked benchmarks from AMD and other sources floating around, but now it's time to put our best foot forward and see what all the fuss is really about!

We kick things off today with the flagship Ryzen chip; the Ryzen 7 1800X, which offers up 8 cores, 16 threads, and an incredible launch price of just $499, which comes in at less than half the price of a similar specification Intel Core i7-6900K. While we want to see AMD set some top scores today, even if it's a close call compared to the performance of the Intel hardware, at half the price, we would still chalk that up as a huge win, both for AMD and consumers.

All Ryzen CPUs come with an unlocked multiplier, that feature is enabled by the motherboard rather than the chip itself. Of course, we'll be putting the 1800X we have in one of the latest X370 motherboards, so we'll be pushing this chip to its limits to see what it can really do. The chip can overclock itself using Extended Frequency Range (XFR) and can push the speeds up to a tasty 4.1GHz assuming that the CPU has thermal headroom, so a powerful cooler is recommended to get the most out of it, but that's true of overclocking on any CPU or platform.