JayzTwoCents 30 Day Challenge – Video Editing on the Ryzen 1800X [Updated]

Updated 4/11/17: Added recap/results video now that the 30 days has elapsed.

Well this is pretty cool.  Tech YouTuber and ardent Nismo fan JayzTwoCents has decided to put his money where his mouth is, and lock himself into using his Ryzen 1800X build for all of his video editing tasks for the next month.

While we’re not in the “YouTube recap” business, I think that this is highly pertinent, considering the article I wrote up recently about Ryzen as a CPU choice for content creators.  In the article, I looked at how the strengths of the Ryzen 7 platform is almost tailor-made for video editing and other tasks that love a good ol’ multi-threaded CPU monster.  Seeing as the current Intel offerings are all well over $1000, the Ryzen 1800X comes in at half that (or one third, if you’re looking at the 6950X), as a 8-core, 16-thread bargain.

People are looking at Ryzen as being a viable alternative to the Intel CPUs, no doubt.  And this sort of test is absolutely crucial to early adoption of these new entrants to the industry.  Buyers want to get more value for their dollar, but Ryzen is still pretty untested as an actual use case goes.  We know what the benchmarks say, and so far it’s leaning heavily towards being a great buy.  However, that’s all mostly theory, for now.

But how does it actually stack up to one of these wallet-crushers in a real world application?  In this video, Jay puts his 1800X build up against his 5960X test bench, both relatively evenly spec’d.  The Ryzen build has two Maxwell architecture Titan Xs, while the 5960X machine has twin 1080s (not the TI versions).  And despite the 5960X being able to overclock to 4.5Ghz, Jay has evened this out to be closer to the clock speed of the 1800X.  I won’t spoil the results for you, but it’s definitely good news for content creators looking for massive power on a budget(ish).

This is the first real-world use test of a Ryzen CPU I’ve seen like this so far.  But again, we’re still very new into the life cycle of this platform, and hopefully we’ll see more of these examples in the near future.

In the meantime, pop on over to Jay’s channel and check out his Ryzen coverage.  He’s done an excellent job of giving the chip a fair shake, and is looking to represent it as honestly as possible.

Update: How did Ryzen hold up after 30 days?