AMD Ryzen 5 1600 & 1400 CPU Review @ [H]

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AMD Ryzen 5 1600 & 1400 CPU Review - AMD has been on a tear with its new Ryzen 7 CPUs over the past few weeks and now it is time for the Ryzen 5 processor family performance to be explored. We are giving away the AMD Reviewer's Kit with a 1600X and 1500X, instead we bought 1600 and 1400 processors to review here today. All data is retail CPUs, and all overclocked to 4GHz.


Newegg AMD Ryzen 5 1600 - $220 - Amazon

Newegg AMD Ryzen 5 1600X - $250 - Amazon

Amazon AMD Ryzen 5 1500X - $211

AMD Ryzen 5 1400 - $170
 
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yeah definitely a nice review and thanks for spending the time doing it.. i think i know which processor i'll be going with and that will be the 1600.. if i ever find 12 threads not to be enough it's an easy upgrade to the 1700 without having to replace anything else.
 
Good stuff, the 1600 makes me want to put my i5 4670 out to pasture. May have missed this here or in another review, but what kind of idle/load temps were you getting on these at 4ghz?
 
Good stuff, the 1600 makes me want to put my i5 4670 out to pasture. May have missed this here or in another review, but what kind of idle/load temps were you getting on these at 4ghz?
Bunch of that in the overclocking video. At 4GHz up to 73C. The reported temp at idle jumps around from 35C to 45C.

 
As much as I want to upgrade my 4670K I think I'll hold on to it a while longer. Good to know there are AMD options out there that will fit my budget and use style.

My wife is absolutely loving her 1800X system. I saved a ton of money by not going with Xeon.

AMD is BACK!
 
Argh well this isn't helping the wait for all my build parts to come in.

Looking forward to the gaming review article, should put a 'before and after' photo of Brent in the article. Would be cool to see the physical ramifications of what the demands of Taskmaster Bennett entail.
 
This is awesome news.

As a system builder and local "gaming guy" for my day-job, I sell WAY more i5 7400s and 7500s in new gaming builds due to people being budget constrained. The 7600K OC'd to 5.0 is not within many customer's price ranges, and Intel's more affordable quad-core chips don't even boost to 4.0GHz. I can definitely see how Ryzen is ultra-competitive, or even a clear winner in these price brackets.

Nobody can argue with the clock scalability of the unlocked Intel quads, but the MAJORITY of my customer's PCs are using stock clocked i5's boosting to around 3.8GHz on stock cooling, or basic H60-ish or Hyper212 style coolers that wouldn't support outlandish OC's anyway. If a customer hands me $3K to build a new gaming system, sure, the unlocked i7s and a beefy 240mm AIO are a no-brainer, but those sort of systems/customers are in the minority.
 
Kickass Kyle.. you have been on a tear yourself lately with all the videos and articles.. sacrificing your thumbnail and probably some sleep for us [H] peons!! THANKS for this article and all your [H] work and effort for keeping fake tech news away from our eyeballs and giving us all the fact checked truth!!

After reading your article word for word, I got on my little pony and galloped around the Internet looking at other Ryzen 5 reviews and complied some concluding thoughts of other (lesser) tech reviewers. For those interested, VideoCardz has a list of websites with Ryzen 5 reviews here. Kyle, you might want to contact VideoCardz and whip their ass since they don't have [H] listed which throws into questions the intelligence of whoever is behind that site.. I mean leaving out the Internet's PREMIER website but putting up Russian site Ixbt instead!! What gives?? Perhaps a Russian hack!! Make them list it as [H]ardOCP so you get placed at the top!!

PS.. after trying to post this, I got this message.. Please enter a message with no more than 20000 characters so I had to do some trimming.. never knew there was a character limit here!! Now I do!! NBC, the more you know.. CBS cares!!


OverClockersClub

1080p gaming performance lags behind that of comparable Intel processors. The reality is that when gaming and you are not GPU limited, Ryzen is currently a lower performing processor in some, but not all, games. While delivering lower FPS in some games, you still get a very solid gaming experience. If you crank up the visual quality settings, of course, you become GPU limited, but at that point you gain some parity. I found the ASUS B350 Prime Plus to offer a full feature set that provides all the basics you can use without throwing money out the window. It has all the ASUS features you are used to seeing from an excellent sound solution to LED effects, a red and black theme, and solid build. For $99, you cannot go wrong with the board. Overclocking limited to 4.0GHz


Rowdy Ryan

Under a full load in Cinebench R15, the 1600X system uses 138 watts, a 43% premium over the 7600K from Intel. Even the 1500X uses more power. The Ryzen 5 1600X goes up against the Core i5-7600K while the 1500X is even with the Core i5-7500. In both cases, the Ryzen 5 provides a dramatic multi-threaded advantage despite the continuation of the single threaded deficits. Single threaded workloads, when used in a vacuum, will still run better on Intel hardware. Audio encoding, user interface interactivity and many other working environments fall into this category so it is not something we should simply overlook. Getting a 12-thread system for $249 (CPU cost) compared to a 4-thread system (with the Core i5) at the same price point, seems like a no-brainer, especially if you aren't overly concerned with the single threaded performance.. pure gamers will likely want to stick to Intel for now


Bit-Tech

.. the 20°C temperature offset is in force on the Ryzen 5 1600X as it was on the X-edition Ryzen 7 CPUs, although it was only at nearly 4GHz and over 1.42V that temperatures got anywhere near levels that are remotely concerning. A decent air cooler will keep things in check using our settings, which were a vcore of 1.425V, which allowed us to get to 3.95GHz across all six cores. Even raising this to a little over 1.43V didn't net even an extra 25MHz. ..the Ryzen 5 1600X had the edge over the stock speed Core i7-6850K and the Core i7-7700K in HandBrake, even when the latter was overclocked to 5GHz, and it edged out an even bigger lead in the CPU-Z multi-threaded test too. It was a similar story in Cinebench, with the Ryzen 5 1600X again beating the overclocked Core i7-7700K and stock speed Core i7-6850K. Once overclocked, the Ryzen 5 1600X cemented its place as a great multi-threaded performance CPU, leapfrogging the stock speed Ryzen 7 1700 in HandBrake and coming within a fraction of the faster-clocked Intel Core i7-6850K. Cinebench painted an even rosier picture, with the Ryzen CPU beating the overclocked Core i7-6850K and leaving Intel's quad-cores in its dust. However, it did little to bolster gaming performance.. games are one area that AMD continues to lag behind. Even when overclocked, the AMD CPU was often slower than Intel CPUs with significantly faster frequencies.. the Ryzen 1600X is a superb budget CPU for multi-threaded performance and appears to be able to nail a near 4GHz overclock fairly easily.


HardwareCanucks

The 1600X sample I have in hand landed at just over 4GHz before the system simply cut off its power, leaving me with a black screen whenever load was applied. I could actually boot into Windows without a problem all the way up to 4.3GHz but that power limitation kept stepping in. Unfortunately the 1500X was in the exact same position: 4Ghz or so.. if there’s a CPU (Ryzen 5 1600X) I could get excited about, it would be this one. Despite a price alignment with Intel’s quad thread i5-7600K, it easily matches or beats Intel’s i7-7700K in most real world and synthetic benchmarks. Meanwhile, due to high base and XFR frequencies it makes the $500 Ryzen 7 1800X look completely overpriced and outclassed in every gaming-centric price / performance metric. This just goes to prove my initial opinion about those Ryzen 7 processors: they make for poor value when installed in a system used exclusively for gaming. My opinion about the Ryzen 5 1500X is a bit less definitive but that doesn’t mean it should be overlooked.. In multithreaded workloads it walks all over the similarly priced i5-7500 and still hangs on strong in less highly threaded real world scenarios. However, Intel’s raw clock speed advantage still wins out in some cases, especially within situations that aren’t heavily multithreaded like games. One particularly egregious example of this is Adobe’s Premier Pro which saw the i5-7500 hang right with a Ryzen 5 1500X despite the fact Intel’s processor features four less processing threads. Honestly I feel the 1500X’s relatively low 3.5GHz / 3.7GHz frequencies play some havoc with its overall results.. the 1600X should be destined for greatness. Its price, performance, efficiency, decent overclocking headroom, situational adaptability and so much more make it one of the best CPU’s released in the last half decade.


Hexus

We managed to increase both CPUs to an all-core 4.1GHz by dialling voltage up to 1.40V. It is clear that the first batch of Ryzen chips, all cut from the same cloth, have an air-cooled ceiling of between 4.0-4.2GHz.

A nice little boost in performance is always welcome. Our long-term advice would be to dial the speed back to an all-core 4.0GHz and enjoy excellent performance for your buck.The 1400 and 1500X CPUs offer four cores and eight threads while 1600 and 1600X up the ante to six and 12, thus offering a core topology that is currently missing from rival Intel's catalogue. Ryzen 5 plays particularly well with those who can take liberal advantage of cores and threads, evidenced by our bang4buck graphs on the previous page, where AMD makes a clean sweep. The situation is less clear cut for single-threaded applications


KitGuru

Ryzen 5’s gaming performance is not as strong as its Intel competitors. At 1080P with a large excess in GPU horsepower, the Ryzen 5 performance deficits are evident and will be deal-breakers to high refresh rate gamers. That’s disappointing given that this is the price point where pure PC gamers have found such value with Intel’s multiplier-unlocked Core i5 quad-cores over the years.

With that said, higher resolution gaming with graphics cards of appropriate power for 1440P and 4K monitors is fine on Ryzen 5. The Core i5-7600K is still slightly faster at 1440P when paired with a GTX 1070 but the performance gap is narrowed by a significant margin. 4K performance from Ryzen 5 1600X is practically identical to that of the Core i5 competition due to such emphasis being put on GPU capabilities.

There is the added dimension of spare CPU performance for Ryzen 5 1600X. In some of our gaming tests, the twelve-thread 1600X had utilisation in the 50% region. This means that somebody interested in game streaming or multitasking whilst gaming still has around half of their processor to dedicate to such tasks. The same cannot be said about the Core i5-7600K that was generally closing in on maximum utilisation for its gaming results (albeit with better performance numbers than Ryzen 5 1600X).

If you do nothing other than game on your computer and don’t want to wait for ‘suggested’ performance optimisations, Intel’s competing Core i5-7600K is currently the better choice. However, if gaming is only one aspect of your daily computer usage and you conduct any tasks that involve heavy multi-threading, the Ryzen 5 1600X and its twelve threads offer a sizeable performance increase over Intel’s 4C4T competitors. Ryzen 5 1600X is punching well above its weight in terms of raw computational performance.


OverClockers


The 1600X reached a max speed, on all cores and threads, of 4125 MHz. This was while running DDR4-3200 16-15-15.
The 1500X reached a max speed, on all cores and threads, of 4050 MHz. This was while running DDR4-3200 16-15-15.

The 1500X, in most cases, performed on par with the i7-7700K. Even though you can overclock the i7 further, the MSRP of the Ryzen 5 1500X is only $189. That’s a monstrous difference in price/performance. The Ryzen 5 1600X is performing well above the i7-7700K and even outperforming the i7-5820K in anything multi-threaded while holding equal in gaming performance.


Star Trek/Wars lovin' Gordon Mah Ung

Ryzen may still have problems with older games if only because game developers are unlikely to update code for a 2014 title. However, I’d bet few of you are having problems running a three-year-old game with your rig today. A modern GPU and modern CPU can run any older title without issues. The more important question is whether developers will support Ryzen going forward for games that come out in 2020—not 2014.

When it comes to deciding the matter at hand—which is the best $250 CPU—the complicated answer is: Match the workloads above with what you do and choose based on your needs, not what someone tells you is right. The problem is, people don’t want complicated answers. They want simple answers and they want you to pick for them. In that case, Ryzen 5 is the way to go. It burns Core i5 to the ground in multi-threaded applications performance and doesn’t give up much in single-threaded performance. On the thorny gaming question, Core i5 still has an advantage for now. We expect newer games will support Ryzen, making the performance difference mostly moot down the road. It’s pretty hard to pass up the incredible performance the Ryzen 5 1600X offers, especially as we move into a world where more cores and more threads are expected to matter.


TechReport

The Ryzen 5 1600X falls right between Intel's most modern Core i5s for delivered gaming smoothness. The Ryzen 5 1600X gives gamers real choice at the $250 price point for the first time in several years.

The $189 Ryzen 5 1500X could also be an appealing CPU value for gamers, even if its performance isn't quite as eyebrow-raising as that of the 1600X. The hot Ryzen quad-core only trails the Core i5-6600K by about 7% in our 99th-percentile-FPS metric, and it'll sell for 20% less than the unlocked Skylake quad-core did at the height of its popularity. Unlike Intel's unlocked quads (and the Ryzen 5 1600X), the 1500X will also be ready to go out of the box thanks to its included Wraith Spire cooler. Gamers considering this CPU will almost certainly pair it with a more modest graphics card than the GTX 1080 on our test bench, and it should serve as quite the solid foundation for an RX 480- or GTX 1060-powered gaming PC.

The Ryzen 5 1600X seems like the Ryzen chip to get if you're a gamer. Its high clock speeds and generous thermal envelope let it deliver gaming performance on par with that of the $500 Ryzen 7 1800X, and its six fast cores and 12 threads should let it offer plenty of performance in non-gaming tasks.


TechSpot

When it came to overclocking, our 1600X sample was good for 4.1GHz while the 1500X sample hit 3.95GHz. Testing with Premiere Pro saw the 1600X boost its performance by 9% once overclocked, making it slightly faster than the stock Core i7-7700K and not much slower than the stock 1800X. The 1500X performance was improved by just 4%, which was disappointing.. all Ryzen 5 overclocking was done using the Wraith Spire for the 1500X and the Wraith Max for the 1600X. Keep in mind while the 1600 does come with the Wraith Spire the 1600X that we are testing here, doesn’t come with a cooler at all. For this reason I strongly suggest buying the cheaper 1600 over the 1600X.

Priced at $250, the six-core 1600X is an exceptional buy and a fantastic alternative to Intel's Core i5-7600K, which offers only four cores for the same price. Granted, they're exceptionally good cores that can be pushed quite far and may even look to be the better choice right now in most games. The 1600X is a beast for content creation at this price point, roughly matching the 7700K for $100 less.

Ryzen 5 feels more like an enthusiast-grade product than Intel's thanks to its quality heatsink and unlocked multiplier as well as overclocking support on not just the flagship chipset but also the affordable B350.

After accounting for the cooler and comparing the price of these processors with an entry-level motherboard that supports overclocking, we find that the 1600X actually ends up costing 8% less, not the 4% more it seems for just the CPU. If you opt for the vanilla 1600 like I suggest, then you're saving over 15% on the core components. That's pretty insane for a 12-thread setup versus a quad-core.

If you thought the 1600X seemed liked a pretty obvious choice, then sit down, the 1500X is a no brainer. Quad-cores are somewhat unexciting in 2017 but the SMT-enabled, four-core, eight-thread 1500X does rather well for itself and represents an exceptional value at $190.

For around the same money, your alternatives are the Core i5-7400 and 7500, which were handily dispatched by the 1500X throughout our testing. They were evenly matched in gaming for the most part, though the 1500X can be overclocked at no extra cost while it's impossible to squeeze any more performance out of the locked Intel chip.
Overall I think I'm more impressed with Ryzen 5 series than I was with Ryzen 7 for the simple fact that there is less competition at these price points. Intel has done a poor job of looking after enthusiasts, particularly those on a budget and this is where these new Ryzen 5 chips really hit hard.


Won't you take me to TweakTown

At similar price points to Intel's offerings, the multi-threaded advantages of the Ryzen microarchitecture provide major benefits. Even in some of the games, the 1600X and 1500X went head to head with the 7600K and 7500, and they are in very similar price brackets. All that being said, you aren't going to see a major difference between a similarly priced Ryzen CPU and Intel CPU in games if you have a nice GPU setup. What I really liked about the Ryzen 5 1600X is that it bring 6-cores and 12-threads into the reach of the average consumer, and hopefully, this will push developers towards taking advantage of more cores since IPC improvements are becoming harder to come by.


Anand-less AnandTech

The usual culprits show big wins for AMD here: 2D to 3D photo conversion, ray tracing, Blender, Cinebench, Encryption and video transcoding are all sizable wins. For around $250, Ryzen is the only way to go. As you would expect, AMD still lags in IPC to Intel, so a 4.0 GHz AMD chip can somewhat compete in single threaded tests when the Intel CPU is around 3.5-3.6 GHz

Platform wise, the Intel side can offer more features on Z270 over AM4, however AMD would point to the lower platform cost of B350 that could be invested elsewhere in a system.

On performance, for anyone wanting to do intense CPU work, the Ryzen gets a nod here. Twelve threads are hard to miss at this price point. For more punchy work, you need a high frequency i5 to take advantage of the IPC differences that Intel has.

For gaming, our DX12 titles show a plus for AMD in any CPU limited scenario, such as Civilization or Rise of the Tomb Raider in certain scenes. For e-Sports, and most games based on DX9 or DX11, the Intel CPU is still a win here.


TomsHardware

AMD's six- and eight-core models demonstrate similar power characteristics. Because there's really no difference between them, we can only assume that the CPUs with disabled cores didn't have them cut off electrically. As a result, they're still being supplied with power. It’s anyone’s guess at this point whether it'll ever be possible to activate disabled cores/cache against AMD's wishes. More than likely, though, the company took pains to prevent that kind of modding.. the Ryzen 5s aren’t any more or less efficient than the eight-core variants. This leads us to two conclusions. First, the Ryzen 5's die quality isn't any worse than what you get from Ryzen 7, and it doesn’t negatively impact efficiency or drive up power consumption. Second, disabling cores to yield a Ryzen 5 doesn’t result in better efficiency, which makes it highly likely that these deactivated parts are still supplied with power. The power consumption results across all of AMD's Ryzen processor models are solid compared to Intel's equivalent CPUs, except at idle..

.. overclocking is allowed on inexpensive B350-based motherboards. This makes Ryzen 5 a much better value than Broadwell-E, arguably superior to Ryzen 7 for mainstream gamers, and at least competitive with Kaby Lake. As shown in our Infinity Fabric-oriented tests, though, you'll want a fast memory kit to achieve the best gaming performance.
Ryzen 5 1600X provides a tremendous price-to-performance ratio for budget workstations, rivaling Core i7-6800K. It also facilitates playable performance in games.. professionals on a budget are far more likely to jump on a potent six-core chip like the 1600X when it's able to beat the $450 Core i7-6800K.

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AMD X370 Motherboards Meet The FLIR Thermal Imager at LegitReviews
 
Kickass Kyle.. you have been on a tear yourself lately with all the videos and articles.. sacrificing your thumbnail and probably some sleep for us [H] peons!! THANKS for this article and all your [H] work and effort for keeping fake tech news away from our eyeballs and giving us all the fact checked truth!!

After reading your article word for word, I got on my little pony and galloped around the Internet looking at other Ryzen 5 reviews and complied some concluding thoughts of other (lesser) tech reviewers. For those interested, VideoCardz has a list of websites with Ryzen 5 reviews here. Kyle, you might want to contact VideoCardz and whip their ass since they don't have [H] listed which throws into questions the intelligence of whoever is behind that site.. I mean leaving out the Internet's PREMIER website but putting up Russian site Ixbt instead!! What gives?? Perhaps a Russian hack!! Make them list it as [H]ardOCP so you get placed at the top!!

PS.. after trying to post this, I got this message.. Please enter a message with no more than 20000 characters so I had to do some trimming.. never knew there was a character limit here!! Now I do!! NBC, the more you know.. CBS cares!!


OverClockersClub

1080p gaming performance lags behind that of comparable Intel processors. The reality is that when gaming and you are not GPU limited, Ryzen is currently a lower performing processor in some, but not all, games. While delivering lower FPS in some games, you still get a very solid gaming experience. If you crank up the visual quality settings, of course, you become GPU limited, but at that point you gain some parity. I found the ASUS B350 Prime Plus to offer a full feature set that provides all the basics you can use without throwing money out the window. It has all the ASUS features you are used to seeing from an excellent sound solution to LED effects, a red and black theme, and solid build. For $99, you cannot go wrong with the board. Overclocking limited to 4.0GHz


Rowdy Ryan

Under a full load in Cinebench R15, the 1600X system uses 138 watts, a 43% premium over the 7600K from Intel. Even the 1500X uses more power. The Ryzen 5 1600X goes up against the Core i5-7600K while the 1500X is even with the Core i5-7500. In both cases, the Ryzen 5 provides a dramatic multi-threaded advantage despite the continuation of the single threaded deficits. Single threaded workloads, when used in a vacuum, will still run better on Intel hardware. Audio encoding, user interface interactivity and many other working environments fall into this category so it is not something we should simply overlook. Getting a 12-thread system for $249 (CPU cost) compared to a 4-thread system (with the Core i5) at the same price point, seems like a no-brainer, especially if you aren't overly concerned with the single threaded performance.. pure gamers will likely want to stick to Intel for now


Bit-Tech

.. the 20°C temperature offset is in force on the Ryzen 5 1600X as it was on the X-edition Ryzen 7 CPUs, although it was only at nearly 4GHz and over 1.42V that temperatures got anywhere near levels that are remotely concerning. A decent air cooler will keep things in check using our settings, which were a vcore of 1.425V, which allowed us to get to 3.95GHz across all six cores. Even raising this to a little over 1.43V didn't net even an extra 25MHz. ..the Ryzen 5 1600X had the edge over the stock speed Core i7-6850K and the Core i7-7700K in HandBrake, even when the latter was overclocked to 5GHz, and it edged out an even bigger lead in the CPU-Z multi-threaded test too. It was a similar story in Cinebench, with the Ryzen 5 1600X again beating the overclocked Core i7-7700K and stock speed Core i7-6850K. Once overclocked, the Ryzen 5 1600X cemented its place as a great multi-threaded performance CPU, leapfrogging the stock speed Ryzen 7 1700 in HandBrake and coming within a fraction of the faster-clocked Intel Core i7-6850K. Cinebench painted an even rosier picture, with the Ryzen CPU beating the overclocked Core i7-6850K and leaving Intel's quad-cores in its dust. However, it did little to bolster gaming performance.. games are one area that AMD continues to lag behind. Even when overclocked, the AMD CPU was often slower than Intel CPUs with significantly faster frequencies.. the Ryzen 1600X is a superb budget CPU for multi-threaded performance and appears to be able to nail a near 4GHz overclock fairly easily.


HardwareCanucks

The 1600X sample I have in hand landed at just over 4GHz before the system simply cut off its power, leaving me with a black screen whenever load was applied. I could actually boot into Windows without a problem all the way up to 4.3GHz but that power limitation kept stepping in. Unfortunately the 1500X was in the exact same position: 4Ghz or so.. if there’s a CPU (Ryzen 5 1600X) I could get excited about, it would be this one. Despite a price alignment with Intel’s quad thread i5-7600K, it easily matches or beats Intel’s i7-7700K in most real world and synthetic benchmarks. Meanwhile, due to high base and XFR frequencies it makes the $500 Ryzen 7 1800X look completely overpriced and outclassed in every gaming-centric price / performance metric. This just goes to prove my initial opinion about those Ryzen 7 processors: they make for poor value when installed in a system used exclusively for gaming. My opinion about the Ryzen 5 1500X is a bit less definitive but that doesn’t mean it should be overlooked.. In multithreaded workloads it walks all over the similarly priced i5-7500 and still hangs on strong in less highly threaded real world scenarios. However, Intel’s raw clock speed advantage still wins out in some cases, especially within situations that aren’t heavily multithreaded like games. One particularly egregious example of this is Adobe’s Premier Pro which saw the i5-7500 hang right with a Ryzen 5 1500X despite the fact Intel’s processor features four less processing threads. Honestly I feel the 1500X’s relatively low 3.5GHz / 3.7GHz frequencies play some havoc with its overall results.. the 1600X should be destined for greatness. Its price, performance, efficiency, decent overclocking headroom, situational adaptability and so much more make it one of the best CPU’s released in the last half decade.


Hexus

We managed to increase both CPUs to an all-core 4.1GHz by dialling voltage up to 1.40V. It is clear that the first batch of Ryzen chips, all cut from the same cloth, have an air-cooled ceiling of between 4.0-4.2GHz.

A nice little boost in performance is always welcome. Our long-term advice would be to dial the speed back to an all-core 4.0GHz and enjoy excellent performance for your buck.The 1400 and 1500X CPUs offer four cores and eight threads while 1600 and 1600X up the ante to six and 12, thus offering a core topology that is currently missing from rival Intel's catalogue. Ryzen 5 plays particularly well with those who can take liberal advantage of cores and threads, evidenced by our bang4buck graphs on the previous page, where AMD makes a clean sweep. The situation is less clear cut for single-threaded applications


KitGuru

Ryzen 5’s gaming performance is not as strong as its Intel competitors. At 1080P with a large excess in GPU horsepower, the Ryzen 5 performance deficits are evident and will be deal-breakers to high refresh rate gamers. That’s disappointing given that this is the price point where pure PC gamers have found such value with Intel’s multiplier-unlocked Core i5 quad-cores over the years.

With that said, higher resolution gaming with graphics cards of appropriate power for 1440P and 4K monitors is fine on Ryzen 5. The Core i5-7600K is still slightly faster at 1440P when paired with a GTX 1070 but the performance gap is narrowed by a significant margin. 4K performance from Ryzen 5 1600X is practically identical to that of the Core i5 competition due to such emphasis being put on GPU capabilities.

There is the added dimension of spare CPU performance for Ryzen 5 1600X. In some of our gaming tests, the twelve-thread 1600X had utilisation in the 50% region. This means that somebody interested in game streaming or multitasking whilst gaming still has around half of their processor to dedicate to such tasks. The same cannot be said about the Core i5-7600K that was generally closing in on maximum utilisation for its gaming results (albeit with better performance numbers than Ryzen 5 1600X).

If you do nothing other than game on your computer and don’t want to wait for ‘suggested’ performance optimisations, Intel’s competing Core i5-7600K is currently the better choice. However, if gaming is only one aspect of your daily computer usage and you conduct any tasks that involve heavy multi-threading, the Ryzen 5 1600X and its twelve threads offer a sizeable performance increase over Intel’s 4C4T competitors. Ryzen 5 1600X is punching well above its weight in terms of raw computational performance.


OverClockers


The 1600X reached a max speed, on all cores and threads, of 4125 MHz. This was while running DDR4-3200 16-15-15.
The 1500X reached a max speed, on all cores and threads, of 4050 MHz. This was while running DDR4-3200 16-15-15.

The 1500X, in most cases, performed on par with the i7-7700K. Even though you can overclock the i7 further, the MSRP of the Ryzen 5 1500X is only $189. That’s a monstrous difference in price/performance. The Ryzen 5 1600X is performing well above the i7-7700K and even outperforming the i7-5820K in anything multi-threaded while holding equal in gaming performance.


Star Trek/Wars lovin' Gordon Mah Ung

Ryzen may still have problems with older games if only because game developers are unlikely to update code for a 2014 title. However, I’d bet few of you are having problems running a three-year-old game with your rig today. A modern GPU and modern CPU can run any older title without issues. The more important question is whether developers will support Ryzen going forward for games that come out in 2020—not 2014.

When it comes to deciding the matter at hand—which is the best $250 CPU—the complicated answer is: Match the workloads above with what you do and choose based on your needs, not what someone tells you is right. The problem is, people don’t want complicated answers. They want simple answers and they want you to pick for them. In that case, Ryzen 5 is the way to go. It burns Core i5 to the ground in multi-threaded applications performance and doesn’t give up much in single-threaded performance. On the thorny gaming question, Core i5 still has an advantage for now. We expect newer games will support Ryzen, making the performance difference mostly moot down the road. It’s pretty hard to pass up the incredible performance the Ryzen 5 1600X offers, especially as we move into a world where more cores and more threads are expected to matter.


TechReport

The Ryzen 5 1600X falls right between Intel's most modern Core i5s for delivered gaming smoothness. The Ryzen 5 1600X gives gamers real choice at the $250 price point for the first time in several years.

The $189 Ryzen 5 1500X could also be an appealing CPU value for gamers, even if its performance isn't quite as eyebrow-raising as that of the 1600X. The hot Ryzen quad-core only trails the Core i5-6600K by about 7% in our 99th-percentile-FPS metric, and it'll sell for 20% less than the unlocked Skylake quad-core did at the height of its popularity. Unlike Intel's unlocked quads (and the Ryzen 5 1600X), the 1500X will also be ready to go out of the box thanks to its included Wraith Spire cooler. Gamers considering this CPU will almost certainly pair it with a more modest graphics card than the GTX 1080 on our test bench, and it should serve as quite the solid foundation for an RX 480- or GTX 1060-powered gaming PC.

The Ryzen 5 1600X seems like the Ryzen chip to get if you're a gamer. Its high clock speeds and generous thermal envelope let it deliver gaming performance on par with that of the $500 Ryzen 7 1800X, and its six fast cores and 12 threads should let it offer plenty of performance in non-gaming tasks.


TechSpot

When it came to overclocking, our 1600X sample was good for 4.1GHz while the 1500X sample hit 3.95GHz. Testing with Premiere Pro saw the 1600X boost its performance by 9% once overclocked, making it slightly faster than the stock Core i7-7700K and not much slower than the stock 1800X. The 1500X performance was improved by just 4%, which was disappointing.. all Ryzen 5 overclocking was done using the Wraith Spire for the 1500X and the Wraith Max for the 1600X. Keep in mind while the 1600 does come with the Wraith Spire the 1600X that we are testing here, doesn’t come with a cooler at all. For this reason I strongly suggest buying the cheaper 1600 over the 1600X.

Priced at $250, the six-core 1600X is an exceptional buy and a fantastic alternative to Intel's Core i5-7600K, which offers only four cores for the same price. Granted, they're exceptionally good cores that can be pushed quite far and may even look to be the better choice right now in most games. The 1600X is a beast for content creation at this price point, roughly matching the 7700K for $100 less.

Ryzen 5 feels more like an enthusiast-grade product than Intel's thanks to its quality heatsink and unlocked multiplier as well as overclocking support on not just the flagship chipset but also the affordable B350.

After accounting for the cooler and comparing the price of these processors with an entry-level motherboard that supports overclocking, we find that the 1600X actually ends up costing 8% less, not the 4% more it seems for just the CPU. If you opt for the vanilla 1600 like I suggest, then you're saving over 15% on the core components. That's pretty insane for a 12-thread setup versus a quad-core.

If you thought the 1600X seemed liked a pretty obvious choice, then sit down, the 1500X is a no brainer. Quad-cores are somewhat unexciting in 2017 but the SMT-enabled, four-core, eight-thread 1500X does rather well for itself and represents an exceptional value at $190.

For around the same money, your alternatives are the Core i5-7400 and 7500, which were handily dispatched by the 1500X throughout our testing. They were evenly matched in gaming for the most part, though the 1500X can be overclocked at no extra cost while it's impossible to squeeze any more performance out of the locked Intel chip.
Overall I think I'm more impressed with Ryzen 5 series than I was with Ryzen 7 for the simple fact that there is less competition at these price points. Intel has done a poor job of looking after enthusiasts, particularly those on a budget and this is where these new Ryzen 5 chips really hit hard.


Won't you take me to TweakTown

At similar price points to Intel's offerings, the multi-threaded advantages of the Ryzen microarchitecture provide major benefits. Even in some of the games, the 1600X and 1500X went head to head with the 7600K and 7500, and they are in very similar price brackets. All that being said, you aren't going to see a major difference between a similarly priced Ryzen CPU and Intel CPU in games if you have a nice GPU setup. What I really liked about the Ryzen 5 1600X is that it bring 6-cores and 12-threads into the reach of the average consumer, and hopefully, this will push developers towards taking advantage of more cores since IPC improvements are becoming harder to come by.


Anand-less AnandTech

The usual culprits show big wins for AMD here: 2D to 3D photo conversion, ray tracing, Blender, Cinebench, Encryption and video transcoding are all sizable wins. For around $250, Ryzen is the only way to go. As you would expect, AMD still lags in IPC to Intel, so a 4.0 GHz AMD chip can somewhat compete in single threaded tests when the Intel CPU is around 3.5-3.6 GHz

Platform wise, the Intel side can offer more features on Z270 over AM4, however AMD would point to the lower platform cost of B350 that could be invested elsewhere in a system.

On performance, for anyone wanting to do intense CPU work, the Ryzen gets a nod here. Twelve threads are hard to miss at this price point. For more punchy work, you need a high frequency i5 to take advantage of the IPC differences that Intel has.

For gaming, our DX12 titles show a plus for AMD in any CPU limited scenario, such as Civilization or Rise of the Tomb Raider in certain scenes. For e-Sports, and most games based on DX9 or DX11, the Intel CPU is still a win here.

Great, now I have no need to spend hours upon hours reading reviews that I've been looking forward to.
Thx for ruining my day./sarc :p
 
I think could help them win market share. It looks like R51600 is for enthusiasts/overclockers but the R51600X may be better for OEMs since it hits the 4GHZ without manual overclocking and is only slightly more expensive.

I'm excited to see what happens when they improve the memory speed issues and perhaps clock speed maximums in subsequent genrations. It feels like they released prematurely (haha), but perhaps they needed to to seem relevant. I'm sure they'll continue to iron out issues.

At the very least, this appears to be bringing 6 core to the mainstream where most haven't been. It'll be interesting to see how software uses this new multi-horse chariot. I'm sure banking on 6+ core scaling
 
In addition to this review, I have been reading others, and I will agree that the Ryzen 1500x is by far the clear winner of the best value/Performance of ALL the Ryzen CPUs. Almost Every review agrees. I believe this will also hold true after the Ryzen3 line is released later, because the Ryzen5 1400 is just not quite good enough IMO.

Now as for how this compares with Intel offerings, I am honestly dissapointed, but after Ryzen7, not surprised. Personally, I am an enthusiast, and a bit of a gamer, and when I build my computer, I am both A) value conscious (even for high-end parts that aren't great values, I like to pay as little as possible) and B) looking to see how well it plays current games. I don't care too much about speculating about future theoretical titles. If the computer can't hack it in 3 years, I will updgrade again. The argument (again IMO) that "Intel is only better if all you use your computer for is games, but AMD Ryzen is better for really using the computer" is flawed.

I use my computer for tons of things, and except for rendering video (which mostly is dependent on the speed of a) my read/write speeds from my drives and B) my video card, there is nothing that 99.9% of users will ever do with their computers that are MORE demanding than games. So really a gamer should look at #1, which CPU is best in games. After that, the other tasks will not matter. THEY ALL PLAY NETFLIX THE SAME... and copying files and uploading pictures will be bottlenecked by USB or Drive read/write speeds, internet speeds, etc... so that the CPU makes very little difference for 99% of these typical tasks. Basically, if you aren't gaming, at all, then every one of these CPU's may be considered overkill. To go further, I would probably say the old AMD X4 860 is probably the best budget CPU for non-gamers. Lots of Cores/Threads and acceptable non-gaming performance for recently as little as $60.00!!!

Another review I just read shows that the Kaby Lake i3's match or beat the Ryzen1500x in average FPS in real world games. They used a CPU-heavy game, WarHammer:Total War, as well as a good DX12 title (Tombraider) to show average FPS. Comparing apples to apples (which means Intel$ equivalent CPU -vs- Ryzen$ equivalent CPU) the Ryzen5 4 cores compete with Intel Core-i3 in price (and lose to Intel Core i3 in gaming performance) and the 6-core Ryzen's compete with the Intel Core-i5, and (again) they lose substantively to Intel in gaming performance.

Thanks for the reviews, but I disagree with the recommendation. Ryzen from what I can tell, has failed to beat Intel at ANY price point. This is dissapointing. AMD has succeeded in providing a viable alternative to people who just don't like Intel, for whatever reason. Other than that, I see no reason that I personally would choose to buy any of these CPUs. Hopefully XEN2 will give me something else to change my mind...
 
Wow. Just wow. AMD built a less shitty core but do their normal "give them more value" to blind side people to the technical truth. Man, Intel must still be laughing. Thanks for the review. As always Hardocp, work is appreciated.
 
Thanks for reviewing the R5 1600 Kyle, I'm now looking at upgrading out of the AMD FX series thanks to how cheap these chips are. Hopefully these don't become scarce where you can't find them for at least a month.
 
BTW a "Blink and you miss it!" moment is the gaming tests of Anandtech, Rocket League shows that there is indeed something extremely weird going on with Nvidia Drivers on Ryzen platforms. They need to use that, the extreme case, as a starting point of analysis to fix whatever is happening.


http://www.anandtech.com/show/11244...x-vs-core-i5-review-twelve-threads-vs-four/14
There is something definitely weird going on, this is the most extreme example tho.
 
BTW a "Blink and you miss it!" moment is the gaming tests of Anandtech, Rocket League shows that there is indeed something extremely weird going on with Nvidia Drivers on Ryzen platforms. They need to use that, the extreme case, as a starting point of analysis to fix whatever is happening.


http://www.anandtech.com/show/11244...x-vs-core-i5-review-twelve-threads-vs-four/14
There is something definitely weird going on, this is the most extreme example tho.

That is a huge discrepancy.
When they pair a Fury or a 480 w/ Ryzen, Beast mode gets engaged, weird because AMD drivers are suppose to have more CPU overhead.
Seems to be following the going mantra of Nvidia drivers being borked w/ Ryzen.
 
R5 1600 is such a good value. At a set budget, seems like it would be really hard to recommend Intel for most systems. I guess Intel still makes sense at budgets low enough where a G4560 is the value king, or people who have to have OMGALLTHEFRAMES at 1080p. Otherwise Ryzen offers good enough gaming, great productivity, at lower prices, allowing budget to be used elsewhere for a better overall system.
 
That is a huge discrepancy.
When they pair a Fury or a 480 w/ Ryzen, Beast mode gets engaged, weird because AMD drivers are suppose to have more CPU overhead.
Seems to be following the going mantra of Nvidia drivers being borked w/ Ryzen.
I was chatting with Nate over at Legit Reviews this morning, and he was seeing some VERY "odd" numbers as well, so I am not so sure that we are not just seeing a bug here. That said, we are testing....testing...and more testing.
 
After checking out several reviews on the 1600/x. I think it's time to commence services.


I want to officially open a memorial service for the intel i5.




Intel i5 (2009-2017)

You had a good life, but now there is no longer a point. In 2017 you still push yourself ahead a small bit but have similar or worse minimums, and are vastly inferior at anything that requires more than 4 threads. And even in gaming, anyone that holds you better close out all their tabs if they want a chance at getting close to pulling ahead at all.


And now, your watch has ended.
 
Looking at this review, the 1600 is the "it" processor for the price point. Competitive with the i5 in the gaming benchmarks (which we all know are not necessarily reflective of real-world performance, unless your dropping mega$$$ on video cards) and generally outperforming the i5 in everything else - We have a winner for the price point! If you're going to look at how the i7 outperforms the 1600, then you're looking at spending the extra money anyway, so that isn't a serious consideration for me.
 
Thanks Kyle for putting so much time AND money for this review! Testing retail samples is the extra mile and I'm sure many of us really appreciate it.
Because of this [H] is still the gold standard in hardware reviews.

A $219 Ryzen 5 1600 beating my [email protected] Cinebench 15 score??? I say this is good for all of us!
(last week got an R7 1700, waiting for the remaining pieces to assemble a rendering machine!)

Cheers.
 
Looking at this review, the 1600 is the "it" processor for the price point. Competitive with the i5 in the gaming benchmarks (which we all know are not necessarily reflective of real-world performance, unless your dropping mega$$$ on video cards) and generally outperforming the i5 in everything else - We have a winner for the price point! If you're going to look at how the i7 outperforms the 1600, then you're looking at spending the extra money anyway, so that isn't a serious consideration for me.


Also, the 1600 ought to have much better legs going forward, I do not think 4 cores/threads will be the target to be catered to in performance intensive games much longer. Even better, since it's on the AM4 platform and cheaper than the pricier r7 series, it makes the perfect good enough for now cpu and switch to something better in 1-3 years on the same MB.


I remember reading that AMD was targeting a tock tock tock strategy with each iteration of their cpus, not 5% increases per year, but more like 10-15% ipc gains. (possible? No idea) That coupled with higher clocks in future releases provides a much easier drop in upgrade path than the intel counterparts if something far faster comes along.
 
I'm very tempted to know what the bug is regarding nVidia drivers on AM4. As a 1070 owner, I'm really interested in these details and what they are because it may impair my jump to the platform.
 
With a nearly equivalent price tag, I'm curious as to how Ryzen 5 1400 stacks up against the i3 7350k? For the budget enthusiast, having those two extra cores might sway one over any notion of frequency advantage. That's assuming one doesn't need heavy investment in a motherboard, ram, etc.
 
Well if history is anything to go by, the person who is most likely to solve this mystery and call out the offending party, will be you Kyle.
Got my popcorn and my beer ready to go. ;)

Unlike the pact of frothing wolves that is /r/amd, there are plenty of legitimate reasons why Nvidia GPUs may not be performing as well on Ryzen as they should be. Zen is a new architecture and perhaps akin to the games, Nvidia's drivers are not optimized for Zen and need work. Perhaps the way games are interacting between GPU and CPU are leading to the strange results. Perhaps Rocket League is the outlier and other games work fine.
 
Unlike the pact of frothing wolves that is /r/amd, there are plenty of legitimate reasons why Nvidia GPUs may not be performing as well on Ryzen as they should be. Zen is a new architecture and perhaps akin to the games, Nvidia's drivers are not optimized for Zen and need work. Perhaps the way games are interacting between GPU and CPU are leading to the strange results. Perhaps Rocket League is the outlier and other games work fine.

I concur with what your saying, but from what I've been seeing, RL is not the only game having problems when a Nvidia GPU is paired w/ Ryzen.
 
I concur with what your saying, but from what I've been seeing, RL is not the only game having problems when a Nvidia GPU is paired w/ Ryzen.

Well, my point was more along the lines meant for people who regard Nvidia's strange performance as a deliberate attempt to cap Ryzen's performance.
 
Well, my point was more along the lines meant for people who regard Nvidia's strange performance as a deliberate attempt to cap Ryzen's performance.


It's not a crazy speculation that nvidia might be less enthusiastic about getting performance on their cards up to snuff while using ryzen vs intel since AMD competes with nvidia more directly than intel does in the gpu space, and I believe that is still where the vast majority of nvidias revenue comes from.

I'm not saying nvidia is abandoning performance improvements on ryzen, but I would not be surprised if they were tempted to slow roll driver updates or not bother. Here is the calculus.

Making our gpus perform better with ryzen makes ryzen more attractive over intel. More money floods to amd instead of intel for cpus, but cash is fungible and that can easily be repurposed to increased budgets for the radeon group. This might turn some people off our gpus if they are seen to perform worse on ryzen, but are people more attached to a gpu vendors or cpus? If people care more about nvidia graphics cards, they might stick with that and pair it with an intel part with non gimped performance.


A lot of mights, I know. Personally, I think the safest strategy is not to do any of that and just try and get performance as high as you can on whatever cpu people have, within reason (sorry via).

We'll have an answer soon enough. Nvidia is usually on top of fixing easy performance issues, if we see zero gains on ryzen where there are clear discrepancies vs intel parts, we'll have strong evidence that nvidia is being less aggressive at improving performance when coupled to AMD cpus. If we do see gains, then the concern will all be hot air. In the internet age, I think it's in all companies interests to make conspiracies become hot air since the information is a lot easier to find out when it comes to performance issues.
 
Well, my point was more along the lines meant for people who regard Nvidia's strange performance as a deliberate attempt to cap Ryzen's performance.

OIC, I myself am not one of them, I can't see a reason why Nvidia would do that, being as they have had the GPU crown now for quite some time, and not being in any danger from being dethroned by Vega, not with the 1080Ti and Titan Xp being recently released. And in the low end, they seem content with the 480 giving the 1060 a nose bleed here and there, although they are releasing 1060's with faster memory, but that's just probably them having better yields.

More than likely it's just optimizations in drivers and in games that need to be done, like you said.
 
It's not a crazy speculation that nvidia might be less enthusiastic about getting performance on their cards up to snuff while using ryzen vs intel since AMD competes with nvidia more directly than intel does in the gpu space, and I believe that is still where the vast majority of nvidias revenue comes from.

I'm not saying nvidia is abandoning performance improvements on ryzen, but I would not be surprised if they were tempted to slow roll driver updates or not bother. Here is the calculus.

Making our gpus perform better with ryzen makes ryzen more attractive over intel. More money floods to amd instead of intel for cpus, but cash is fungible and that can easily be repurposed to increased budgets for the radeon group. This might turn some people off our gpus if they are seen to perform worse on ryzen, but are people more attached to a gpu vendors or cpus? If people care more about nvidia graphics cards, they might stick with that and pair it with an intel part with non gimped performance.


A lot of mights, I know. Personally, I think the safest strategy is not to do any of that and just try and get performance as high as you can on whatever cpu people have, within reason (sorry via).

We'll have an answer soon enough. Nvidia is usually on top of fixing easy performance issues, if we see zero gains on ryzen where there are clear discrepancies vs intel parts, we'll have strong evidence that nvidia is being less aggressive at improving performance when coupled to AMD cpus. If we do see gains, then the concern will all be hot air. In the internet age, I think it's in all companies interests to make conspiracies become hot air since the information is a lot easier to find out when it comes to performance issues.

Just did a quick google to see if there was any merit to this and it looks like it's promising there's a lot of performance to be gained.

http://i.imgur.com/OjSIcgM.jpg

This one was interesting:
http://digiworthy.com/2017/04/03/amd-ryzen-nvidia-driver-dx12/

DX12 with Nvidia horrible performance, swap to 480s and DX12 beat DX11.
 
tybert7 that's actually short-sighted reasoning. Your premise is that nVidia wouldn't want an nVidia/Intel combination to be better than an nVidia/AMD combination so as to hurt AMD. However, if an nVidia/AMD combination is suffering in comparison to a RTG/AMD combination, having an attitude of 'not giving a shit about AMD performance' only hurts nVidia as people will be more inclined to go with an RTG/AMD combination than the now possibly inferior nVidia/AMD combination.

I don't know why you feel that nVidia wouldn't care about potential hordes of individuals leaving the nVidia camp for the, er, greener pastures of the RTG side if RTG/AMD has a bit of magic going on...
 
It's not a crazy speculation that nvidia might be less enthusiastic about getting performance on their cards up to snuff while using ryzen vs intel since AMD competes with nvidia more directly than intel does in the gpu space, and I believe that is still where the vast majority of nvidias revenue comes from.
Actually, "crazy speculation" is exactly what that is. And I would also suggest that it is not only crazy, but flat out incorrect.
 
With a nearly equivalent price tag, I'm curious as to how Ryzen 5 1400 stacks up against the i3 7350k? For the budget enthusiast, having those two extra cores might sway one over any notion of frequency advantage. That's assuming one doesn't need heavy investment in a motherboard, ram, etc.

While I am providing links... My below response has the answer to your question... (IN GAMES) the i3-7350K absolutely vanquishes the Ryzen 5 1400. The 1400 could not hit 60fps in 1080p at high settings in Tomb Raider or Total War: Warhammer, acccording to the below review.

https://www.overclock3d.net/reviews/cpu_mainboard/amd_ryzen_5_1400_1500x_and_1600x_cpu_review/15
 
While I am providing links... My below response has the answer to your question... (IN GAMES) the i3-7350K absolutely vanquishes the Ryzen 5 1400. The 1400 could not hit 60fps in 1080p at high settings in Tomb Raider or Total War: Warhammer, acccording to the below review.

https://www.overclock3d.net/reviews/cpu_mainboard/amd_ryzen_5_1400_1500x_and_1600x_cpu_review/15

Nice review. It even has overclocking comparisons.

Throw overclocking into the 7350k vs 1400 mix and things get even nastier. But that's an easy prediction these days.
 
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