AMD Ryzen 5 1600X Review - Review 2022

AMD's long-predictable "Zen" architecture and Ryzen flake platform—which arrived outset with its high-end Ryzen 7 fries—had a bit of a bumpy landing, though its reception was positive overall. The AMD Ryzen vii 1800X and Ryzen 1700X can, in a general computing sense, take on Intel fries that toll twice as much or more, such every bit the Intel Cadre i7-6900K and Core i7-6950X Extreme Edition. That'southward as true of the AMD Ryzen five 1600X ($219.99) which we'll talk over shortly.

Pair one of these new chips with a comparatively low-cost motherboard (starting as low as $69, when nosotros wrote this in mid-Apr 2022), and AMD'southward Ryzen 7 can be quite the bargain for functioning-hungry users on a upkeep. The main problem, though, lies in 1080p gaming performance.

When we tested the Ryzen seven chips at resolutions above 1080p when paired with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 ($549.00 at NVIDIA) graphics menu, performance was effectively identical to a PC with the same card and a high-end Intel CPU. Just stepping downward to 1080p (where most of us still game), the loftier-end Intel chips delivered much higher frame rates, tacking on an extra twenty to xl frames per 2nd (fps) compared to the Ryzen 7 chips. That's a big drop in gaming performance for the AMD CPUs, although the AMD chips were still able to evangelize smooth performance, averaging well to a higher place 60fps in our testing at 1080p.

AMD promised gaming improvements, every bit commuter updates and game patches arrived. And indeed, that seems to be happening, to a certain extent. A contempo update to the game Ashes of the Singularity promises pregnant functioning gains at 1080p, and a new AMD-specific power plan for Windows 10 (which we used in our latest benchmark testing) gives the chip hardware more command over how chop-chop it can ramp up and down, and when information technology parks CPU cores that aren't currently being used. AMD says this should translate to meliorate performance in Total State of war: Warhammer, Gears of War four, Battlefield 4, and a few other games.

In the midst of these promising (though far from across-the-board) changes for the Ryzen platform, lands AMD'due south midrange CPU lineup. It'due south based on the same architecture as Ryzen 7.

These Ryzen 5 fries are more varied in their core count than the Ryzen 7 options (which are all eight cores and 16 threads). And there are more of them. AMD has four Ryzen 5 chips on offer, starting with two four-core, viii-thread chips, the Ryzen 5 1400 ($186.86 at Amazon) and the Ryzen v 1500X ($178.86 at Amazon) . Climbing up the Ryzen ladder y'all'll side by side detect the 6-core, 12-thread Ryzen v 1600 ($145.99 at Amazon) , and the peak-terminate Ryzen v 1600X that we're looking at here. Pricing is, equally we'd look, more pocket-sized for these midrange fries, as well, with the Ryzen 5 1400 selling for $169 and the Ryzen 5 1600X topping out the Ryzen 5 line at $249.

The Ryzen 5 1600X has a variable clock speed between 3.6GHz (base) and 4GHz (boost), and the ability get even higher if yous pair it with a very capable cooler. (More on that subsequently.) The Ryzen 5 flagship's $249 request cost makes it more expensive than the Core i5-6600K (a four-cadre, 4-thread chip that sells for around $220), only far less pricey than the 4-core, 8-thread Core i7-7700K , which sells for most $340.

So how does the Ryzen 5 1600X stack up against Intel's offerings, and has AMD fabricated headway with the 1080p gaming-operation issues nosotros first saw with the Ryzen seven chips? To observe that out, let's dig deep and put the chips through our suite of performance benchmarks. Follow united states of america below every bit we do just that. But we'll let one bit slip through up summit: If we were building a general-purpose performance PC from scratch today, the Ryzen 5 1600X would be at the peak of our CPU consideration listing.

From a computing-performance perspective, AMD's Ryzen 7 processors are quite impressive for CPUs priced betwixt $329 and $499. But of class, non anybody tin can afford to spend that much on a processor—even if it's arguably a steal compared to Intel'due south pricing. And coin aside, unless you are a content creator, transcode video constantly, or run CPU-intensive inquiry tasks, you won't frequently make use of the eight cores and xvi threads broiled into the Ryzen seven parts, anyway. For power users with lesser demands (and tighter budgets), AMD is offering up four Ryzen five processors, with fewer cores and lower prices.

The Ryzen five lineup consists of two six-core and two four-core Ryzen 5 chips. Lower-end Ryzen 3 offerings are coming, says AMD, in the second one-half of 2022.

AMD Ryzen v Flake Details

A couple of features on all of these chips set them autonomously from Intel's competing offerings. For one: AMD says all the Ryzen chips will be unlocked for overclocking. And, at least from the details we have well-nigh the Ryzen seven and Ryzen 5 chips announced so far, all those chips will feature thread-doubling simultaneous multi-threading (SMT). SMT is similar to the Hyper-Threading engineering featured in most (only not all) of Intel's mid-to-high-end Core processors. Notably, the unlocked Intel Cadre i5-7600K and previous-generation Cadre i5-6600K ($221.00 at Amazon) lack Hyper-Threading, leaving them stuck at four processing threads, while AMD'south Ryzen 5 1600 and the Ryzen five 1600X scrap nosotros're looking at here take 12 available processing threads, and the Ryzen 5 1400 and 1500X accept viii.

AMD sent along a review sample of the acme-terminate $249 Ryzen v 1600X, also as the Ryzen 5 1500X. Nosotros tested the two Ryzen 5 fries alongside each other, and present them both in our comparison charts coming upwards, and then you lot'll be able to go a sense of how both perform when we get to our benchmarks later on.

AMD says the Ryzen 5 1600X has a 95-watt TDP (thermal pattern ability, a measurement of estrus-dissipation requirements), just like the higher-end eight-core Ryzen 7 chips. That's opposed to the 65-watt rating of the four-core Ryzen 5 fries similar the 1500X. Unless y'all're an extreme stickler most power consumption, the divergence won't be all that important. But if you're edifice a small system without much room for a cooler, you may desire to opt for one of the 65-watt parts.

The Ryzen v 1600X has a base clock speed of 3.6GHz, and the ability to ramp up to 4GHz. It tin can technically ramp upward to iv.1GHz under certain weather with a reasonably powerful cooler, cheers its XFR feature (more than on XFR later on).

AMD Wraith Max

AMD sent along the RGB-light-ringed Wraith Max cooler for testing, shown above, which is what we used for our benchmarking. But note that this flake doesn't really ship with a CPU libation. The Wraith Max actually ships with the eight-cadre Ryzen 7 1700 ($259.86 at Amazon) . AMD's thinking is that if yous're opting for the Ryzen 5 1600X, you're probably an enthusiast who will want to install your ain aftermarket libation. That's probably true, for the most part, merely make certain if yous don't accept an existing cooler you lot want to employ, that you factor one into your build budget.

And even if you do take a cooler, unless y'all bought it very recently, yous'll have to bank check with the manufacturer nigh mailing away for an adapter kit for Ryzen, as the mounting machinery isn't the aforementioned equally on AMD's previous AM3+ or FM2+ motherboards. AM4 is a new socket.

The New AMD Chipsets: X370, B350, and More than

While the AMD Ryzen 5 1600X doesn't have the same behemothic price advantage over Intel every bit the Ryzen seven 1800X does, it makes up for that somewhat when yous consider the platform as a whole. The motherboards that AMD's partners rolled out around Ryzen and shortly afterwards sweeten the bargain.

Want a Ryzen-based board that lets you overclock and install a single high-terminate graphics card like the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti or ane of AMD'southward upcoming "Vega" cards? That will fix y'all back as niggling as $69, say, for the ASRock AB350M-HDV. The higher-terminate X370 boards are better equipped to handle high-end builds, and they support dual-card Nvidia configurations in SLI. Just some B350 boards accept two graphics-carte slots and support dual AMD-card setups via CrossFire.

That's the case with the Gigabyte AB350-Gaming iii that we used for testing. It sells for between $99 and $109, and it is no low-end, feature-barren lath. It sports RGB lighting, metallic-wrapped graphics-carte slots, and an M.2 slot for super-fast solid-state drives like the Samsung SSD 960 EVO . Yous tin can certainly spend more; some initial AM4 boards are priced as high as $300. But nosotros've seen several solid-looking options in the $100 range. You can certainly discover good Intel-based options in this price range, too. Simply if you care about features like RGB lighting and metal-wrapped slots (and we're certainly not implying that anybody does), you'll generally take to pay a little more for an Intel-based lath with comparable features.

Technically, 5 new chipsets are on offer with AMD's new motherboards. Here's a wait at their primary features and how they differ, in a summary straight from AMD.

As noted earlier, if you want to install multiple Nvidia graphics cards, yous'll need to opt for the tiptop-end X370 chipset, but even those boards start just at around $110. The A320 chipset and the A300 don't support overclocking, and the latter lacks native support for USB 3.1 Gen ii. But those boards should be even more than toll-aggressive, because they're a step down from the B350 boards, which start as low equally $69.

These lower-finish boards were just trickling out when nosotros wrote this, so nosotros'll have expect to see where they state in terms of features and pricing. Simply we would not be surprised to encounter some of these boards priced every bit low as $50. At present, nosotros're not suggesting y'all opt for the lowest-price board you tin can observe, but the idea of dropping a $249 12-thread CPU into a sub-$100 motherboard and getting similar (and in some tests better) performance to what you lot'd get with a roughly $500 Intel CPU/motherboard combination (with the Cadre i7-7700K) is appealing.

How is AMD able to get its board partners to produce such comparatively inexpensive motherboards? Primarily, it's considering AMD's Ryzen chips (and its upcoming "Raven Ridge" CPU/GPU chips, or APUs, which will utilise the aforementioned AM4 socket) integrate much of the electronics required for interfaces such as USB, SATA, and PCI Express into the fries themselves. As a result, far fewer electronics need to exist built onto the boards.

Not everything hither works in AMD's favor. These chipsets tend to have fewer PCI Express lanes and SATA ports than many enthusiast motherboard/CPU combos from Intel. The meridian-cease AMD X370 chipset natively supports six SATA Three ports and sixteen lanes of PCI Limited Gen 2 for speedy SSDs (on peak of the 24 lanes of PCIe on the Ryzen chips themselves). Intel's X99 platform, in contrast, supports 10 SATA III ports and upwards to 40 PCI Express lanes hanging off the CPU. (The inferior Broadwell-E chip, the Cadre i7-6800K, has "simply" 28 lanes.) So, for those planning on shoving piles of drives and other hardware within their systems, Intel's pricier platform will still hold plenty of entreatment. But for the vast majority of users looking to drop in a CPU, 1 or two graphics cards, and a drive or three, AMD's offering should more than suffice—commonly at a lower price point than comparable Intel-based boards.

Some other area of concern in the weeks subsequently the initial Ryzen launch was motherboard availability. For several days, very few AM4 motherboards were in stock on Newegg and other online outlets, sometimes dwindling downward to but a few in-stock options. That situation seemed to be improving as we wrote this in mid-April 2022. And then, Newegg showed 12 motherboards in stock, although v others were still listed as "Machine-Notify," indicating Newegg wasn't certain when those models would again be available. And fifty-fifty if all of those boards were in stock, 37 models is still a far cry from the "more than 80" motherboards AMD's CEO and president, Lisa Hsu, promised would launch with Ryzen. There are still far more motherboard options bachelor on the Intel side of the silicon fence.

The Architecture Nuts

Every bit noted earlier, the Ryzen chips represent an entirely new architecture for AMD. Gone are the paired modules of cores sharing an L2 enshroud that was a hallmark of the FX processor line. Ryzen's cores are more contained, and they also introduce the thread-doubling SMT nosotros mentioned earlier. SMT is similar to Intel's Hyper-Threading, which allows demanding software that's written to take advantage of it to tackle two calculating threads on each core.

CPU-architecture details tin get extremely technical equally presently as you lot look any deeper than the the surface. But to give you a sense of how AMD has achieved its operation gains with its new Zen architecture, the visitor says it has incorporated an instruction-scheduler window that'south 1.75 times larger, with a 1.5 times greater upshot width, that enables AMD to send more work to the chip'southward execution units.

Here's a expect at the Ryzen die layout, again straight from AMD:

Also, a new branch-prediction unit, which the visitor calls "neural-network-based," helps the chips be smarter about preparing and optimizing instructions and paths for tasks that the flake will need to tackle in the immediate time to come.

This all sounds expert, to the extent that it can be parsed and appreciated without a estimator engineering degree. But power efficiency is another area in which AMD's FX chips have lagged behind Intel for years. The company's FX-8370 ($348.86 at Amazon) chip has a TDP of 125 watts, while Intel'south (very roughly comparable) Core i7-6700K has a TDP of 91 watts. And Intel'south chip includes integrated graphics, while the AMD FX fries (too as the Ryzen seven and Ryzen 5 models) lack that feature, requiring an external graphics menu to plug in to a monitor.

On the surface, at least, information technology seems AMD has made up that basis. The four-core, viii-thread Ryzen v 1500X has a TDP rating of 65 watts, and the Ryzen 5 1600X (with half-dozen cores and 12 threads) is rated at 95 watts. Intel'southward competing Core i5-6600K (with four cores and four threads), meanwhile, is rated at 91 watts, while the Core i3-7350K (2 cores and four threads) has a TDP of threescore watts. At the very to the lowest degree, AMD is closer to Intel in terms of power efficiency than information technology has been in years.

How does AMD achieve its efficiency gains with Ryzen? For starters, these fries are built on a 14nm manufacturing process, the same as fries like the Core i7-6900K ($700.00 at Amazon) , and a big, large spring over the 32nm process used for AMD'southward previous-generation FX chips. And AMD says this 14nm process has already been "density optimized" past the company's manufacturing partner, Global Foundries.

Other efficiency-focused features include a "micro-op" enshroud that keeps important instructions and information close to the cores, rather than having to achieve out to comparatively far-off L2 or L3 caches; and aggressive clock gating, then at that place's less wasted ability in areas of the cores that aren't existence used. Here'southward a visual wait at how AMD aims to go along ability draw downward.

Better Clocks With Improve Coolers: XFR

You may have noticed that the entry-level Ryzen 5 scrap, the Ryzen 5 1400, also as the Ryzen 5 1600, lack an "X" at the end of thier names, dissimilar the Ryzen 5 1500X and 1600X. This X indicates the inclusion of a feature AMD is calling Extended Frequency Range (XFR).

XFR makes use of what the company is calling "SenseMI," sensors and algorithms that, among other things, measure voltage, power, and temperature in fine detail, a one thousand times per second. The sensors monitor where the chip is situated inside its power and estrus envelopes, as well equally where information technology expects to be in the near term.

When it comes to clock speeds, SenseMI allows the fleck to "sense" when information technology has sufficient cooling and, assuming you accept an XFR-enabled model (once again: one of those CPUs that end in "Ten"), to clock fifty-fifty higher than the top boost-clock speed. The idea, at least in role, is to reward buyers or builders who invest in large air coolers or liquid cooling to bask some performance gains.

Now, that sure sounds good. But, at least with the first round of Ryzen vii fries, and the Ryzen v 1600X nosotros're looking at hither, the XFR boost is locked at just an extra 100MHz. That gets a bit amend with the Ryzen five 1500X; it's able to bound up an extra 200MHz with XFR, taking it from a top 3.7GHz to 3.9GHz if in that location's lots of cooling potential available.

We said when nosotros reviewed the Ryzen 7 1800X ($312.00 at Amazon) that nosotros hoped that futurity Ryzen chips would allow for a bigger XFR boost, because the above seems like a long way to become, both in terms of underlying engineering science and the extra price of a meliorate cooler, to gain but an extra 100MHz. That's certainly improved here. Simply going out of your way for XFR for an actress 100MHz with this chip merely makes sense if you lot already have an existing cooler that works with the new AM4 mounting mechanism. Many cooler manufacturers are offering adapter kits for a modest price, or even free, though you'll have to ship abroad for them.

Nosotros don't recommend buying a new, expensive libation for the 1600X. You might get very slightly ameliorate operation by doing so and placing it on this scrap, but that money would be improve spent either stepping up to an viii-core Ryzen 7 chip, or putting the cash toward an SSD or a graphics-card upgrade.

Two things to annotation well-nigh the Ryzen 7 fries as a whole: These are CPUs only, with no onboard graphics, in the same mold every bit Intel'south CPU-simply E-Serial fries. Y'all'll demand to use them with a discrete video carte. And the underside will await familiar to the AMD true-blue:

The Ryzen chips however use pins on the CPU itself, not the socket-side pins and on-chip contacts that Intel has long since moved to.

Performance, Overclocking, and Conclusion

For our examination setup, we dropped the Ryzen 5 1500X into the Gigabyte AB350-Gaming 3 motherboard we mentioned before on, along with 16GB of Geil EVO X DDR4 retentiveness running at 3,200MHz. An AMD Radeon RX 480 ($278.00 at Amazon) video card handled display output for our CPU-specific tests, and a OCZ Vector 150 was the SATA-interface boot drive. We could have used a faster PCI Limited/NVMe drive, but every bit we tested previous chips from Intel and AMD using SATA SSDs, we didn't want to drop in a speed demon and requite the Ryzen v 1600X an unfair advantage. SATA SSDs are all the same very respectable.

Cinebench R15

First up in our testing regimen: Maxon'southward CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 exam, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads, using the CPU rather than the GPU to render a circuitous paradigm. The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC'due south suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Along with the usual test that makes utilise of all bachelor cores, we've added the single-cadre results here to get a sense of how AMD's new scrap fares in lightly threaded workloads.

Single-cadre operation was a sticking point of AMD's previous-generation chips, which y'all can run across by taking a wait back at the AMD FX-8370 ($348.86 at Amazon) review. But AMD's new Ryzen 5 1600X fleck, while it couldn't match the Core i7-7700K or the dual-core Core i3-7350K ($168.95 at Amazon) , was improve than or competitive with everything else here on the unmarried-core exam, including the Cadre i5-6600K.

The newer Intel Kaby Lake Core i7-7700K excelled on the single-core test, cheers to its high clock speed (four.2GHz to 4.5GHz) and newer architecture. Just when taking all cores and threads into account, the Ryzen 5 1600X doubled the score of the Core i5, and fifty-fifty outpaced the $340 Cadre i7 flake past virtually 25 per centum. Only the eight-core, 16-thread Ryzen 7 chips did amend here, and fifty-fifty then, the Ryzen seven 1700 scored only 13 percent meliorate than the six-core Ryzen five.

iTunes 10.6 Conversion Test

Nosotros so switched over to our venerable iTunes Conversion Exam, using version 10.half dozen of iTunes. This test taxes merely a unmarried CPU cadre, equally much legacy software still does.

Music encoding doesn't exactly push a modern CPU to its limits, and certainly not ones like these. But this test all the same illustrates that, for programs that are older or haven't been written to take reward of multiple cores, the Core i7-7700K is notwithstanding male monarch, thanks to its higher clock speed and Intel'due south newest compages. And the Core i3-7350K isn't all that far behind, either.

That said, the AMD chips here weren't that far off the showing of the Core i5-6600K, and the Ryzen 5 1600X did the best among its sibling fries, thanks to its 4.1GHz top clock speed. We'd still like to see the AMD chip do better here, especially given that the Core i3-7350K is speedier at a lower price of about $170. While single- or lightly-threaded tasks are still a sticking point for AMD compared to Intel'due south latest Kaby Lake architecture, we're still marking down AMD's showing here as "good enough." Nigh demanding software that can take adept advantage of lots of cores and threads has been updated to use two or more, at this point.

Handbrake 0.9.9

These days, our traditional Handbrake test (run under version 0.nine.8) takes less than a minute to complete with high-terminate chips like these. (It involves the rendering of a 5-minute video, Pixar'south Dug's Special Mission, to an iPhone-friendly format.) Then, we've switched to a much more taxing (and time-consuming) video-crunching examination that uses a nice, big hunk of 4K video.

In this test, we switched to the newer Handbrake version 0.ix.ix, and tasked the CPUs to convert a 12-infinitesimal-and-fourteen-second 4K .MOV file (the 4K showcase short movie Tears of Steel) into a 1080p MPEG-four video:

If the previous examination left united states wishing for a bit more than performance from AMD'southward new chips, this result left us stunned by what the company was able to deliver.

Not only did the Ryzen 5 1600X shave more than seven minutes off the time of its the Core i5 chip on the aforementioned examination, but information technology was well-nigh two minutes (almost twenty percent) faster than the Core i7-7700K chip, which costs near $90 more.

POV-Ray 3.7

Side by side upward, using the "All CPUs" setting, we ran the POV-Ray benchmark, which challenges all available cores to render a complex photograph-realistic image using ray tracing. After that, again to get a sense of how AMD's new bit handles single-core operation, nosotros ran the same benchmark using the "One CPU" setting.

The Ryzen 5 1600X looked very impressive here again, outpacing the Cadre i7-7700K on the All CPUs test by 21 seconds, while very nearly doubling the score of the Core i5-6600K. Interestingly, even on the I CPU test, the Ryzen 5 1600X edged alee of the Core i5 and Core i3 fries hither. The Cadre i7-7700K notwithstanding reigns supreme when taxing a single core, though. Nothing else here fifty-fifty gets shut.

Blender 2.77a

Blender is an open-source 3D content-creation plan that tin can be used to design and create visual effects, animation, and 3D models for use in video games or 3D printing. Nosotros open up a standard test file (it's of a flight squirrel) and time how long the test processor takes to finish the render.

While the Ryzen 5 1600X couldn't quite catch the Core i7-7700K here, it was only a few seconds backside, while pulling 7 seconds ahead of the Cadre i5-6600K. That said, outside the dual-core Core i3 chip, all the contestants hither were clustered closely together.

7-Zip 16.04 Benchmark

Last, we fired up the popular 7-Zip file-compression software and ran its congenital-in compression/decompression benchmark, which is another useful test of a CPU's multi-core abilities.

Wow. Yet again, the Ryzen 5 1600X blew abroad the Core i5 chip, and surpassed the Core i7-7700K past more than than 15 pct. At this point, it'south clear that in apply cases where yous're using all available cores and threads, no Intel scrap we've tested (or know of) that'due south anywhere close to the $250 toll range of the Ryzen v 1600X can approach the performance that AMD delivers. The half dozen-core, 12-thread Core i7-6800K would likely be a meliorate match, but it sells for $400 and up, and it requires a pricey X99-chipset motherboard.

Overclocking

If you accept a large air cooler or a cocky-contained liquid cooler to strap onto the Ryzen 5 1600X, y'all may be able to push the chip up to a stable 4GHz, or slightly higher. We were able to push button the 8-core Ryzen vii 1800X flagship to 4GHz with a massive (and expensive, at $250) 240mm self-contained cooler from EK Waterblocks (EKWB). Just AMD sent its Wraith Max cooler, which we mentioned before, along with the Ryzen 5 1600X. Technically, this cooler ships with the entry-level Ryzen vii 1700, not the Ryzen 5 chips. But given our limited cooling options (existing CPU coolers demand adapters to work with AMD'southward new socket), we used the Wraith Max for all our testing with this bit. And fifty-fifty though the AMD cooler is rated to dissipate up to 140 watts of cooling, we were only able to bump upwards the Ryzen v 1600X to 3.8GHz, which is 200MHz above the stock 3.6GHz base clock, and lower than this flake's potential 4.1GHz peak XFR clock speed.

Still, the 3.8GHz overclock applies to all six cores, and with it enabled, we were able to shave 10 seconds off our 4K Handbrake transcoding time, an improvement of nearly 2 percent. Again, you may exist able to achieve slightly improve results with a powerful cooler and if y'all wind upwardly with a specially overclocking-friendly fleck sample. Simply from our testing, too as the range of clock speeds in AMD's Ryzen 5 and Ryzen vii lineups, it appears that iv.1GHz or so is likely the speed limit for this generation of AMD silicon, at least for at present. And really, as much as we'd beloved higher clocks to help match Intel's seventh generation chips on lightly threaded tasks, any clock speed shut to 4GHz delivers quite a lot of pep for most common computing tasks.

Gaming Operation

We don't normally run graphics tests when testing processors without integrated graphics. That's mostly considering graphics functioning typically has much more than to do with what graphics card yous have installed than what processor you're using—peculiarly when you're using a adequately powerful chip like the AMD Ryzen five 1600X or Intel'due south competing Core i7-7700K.

But, we knew after testing the Ryzen 7 chips that AMD'southward new CPUs have issues keeping up with Intel's recent Core i5s and Core i7s at 1080p in games. Given this, and the fact that AMD seems to accept been hard at piece of work over the last month or so to meliorate the trouble, we wanted to run across if the Ryzen 5 1600X could deliver acceptable frame rates with a loftier-terminate video card. So we swapped out the AMD Radeon RX 480 video card that nosotros used for the bulk of our criterion testing, dropped in an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition, and ran a few of the tests that we besides utilise for graphics-card testing.

For comparing numbers, we did the same affair with our Intel Kaby Lake testbed running on an Intel Core i7-7700K. Both systems were tested using a Serial ATA-based boot bulldoze and 16GB of RAM. The RAM in our Ryzen five testbed was specifically running at iii,200MHz using the motherboard'south built-in XMP profile. While we haven't done a ton of game testing with AMD's new fries, indications both from other review sites and AMD itself is that faster RAM speeds have more than of an impact on gaming performance than has typically been the case with Intel'southward processors for the last few generations. So keep that in listen if you're buying RAM for a Ryzen-based gaming build.

First, we fired up late 2022's Ascent of the Tomb Raider in DirectX 11 style at the Very High preset and ran the built-in benchmark. In short, we found that AMD has improved performance, just Intel is still well ahead at 1080p.

Our Ryzen 5 1600X-based rig averaged 112fps, 7fps better than nosotros saw when testing the Ryzen 7 1700. But the Cadre i7-7700K averaged 128fps with the same GTX 1080 card. Obviously, knocking 16fps off your gaming performance is never a adept matter—particularly considering how expensive high-end graphics cards are these days. Merely at to the lowest degree we're seeing a Ryzen 5 chip delivering amend performance than the Ryzen seven flake we tested not much more a month ago, indicating the company is delivering improvements.

Just equally with the Ryzen 7 fries, when we stepped up to 4K resolution (3,840x2,160), functioning roughly evened out. At that college setting, the Ryzen v 1600X system delivered an average frame rate of 48.9fps, which is really slightly higher than the 46.6fps average delivered by our Core i7-equipped test bed.

Adjacent, we switched to the game Far Cry Primal, on the title's Loftier preset, and saw more than promising results for AMD. At 1080p in this title, the Ryzen 7 1700 organisation managed an boilerplate of just 76fps, compared to the Core i7-7700K's showing of 130fps, a staggering seventy percent performance edge for Intel. But the lesser Ryzen five 1600X in our B350-based testbed turned in 90fps on the same exam. AMD isn't close to catching Intel here, but a jump from 76fps to 90fps (a proceeds of well-nigh 18 percent) is much appreciated, especially when y'all consider the Ryzen 5 1600X is a lower-cease processor than the Ryzen seven 1700. Jumping upwards to 4K resolution on Far Cry Fundamental, however, all the Ryzen chips we've tested thus far delivered the aforementioned 49fps, a unmarried frame alee of the Intel Core i7-7700K machine's 48fps at the same 4K setting with the aforementioned Nvidia graphics card.

Because nosotros had a fleck more time with this chip, nosotros likewise dropped in a lower-end (though still quite capable) Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 Founders Edition carte into our Ryzen v and Cadre i7-7700K testbeds and repeated the same gaming tests. With this lesser carte du jour, the ii chips delivered essentially the same performance, within 1fps or 2fps, one way or the other.

What exercise we glean from this?

If you're running a midrange graphics menu, the performance deltas at 1080p between an AMD Ryzen 5 or Ryzen 7 scrap and a comparable Intel-based alternative won't likely be all that keen. But for those who utilise high-cease graphics cards to game at very high refresh rates (higher up, say, 100Hz) at 1080p, Intel-based builds are probable the better option, at least for now. We need to see more gaming improvements from AMD on that front end.

But note that, as nosotros mentioned before, AMD has been out of the high-end CPU realm for years, and it seems—at least in the limited tests we were able to exercise before the launch of the Ryzen 5 fries—that the company is making strides to at to the lowest degree lessen the gaming gap between its chips and Intel's at 1080p. Just equally games aren't always optimized for make-new graphics cards as soon equally they launch (particularly if you happen to have a multi-card SLI or CrossFire setup), but are patched in the weeks that follow to evangelize better operation, the same will likely happen on the CPU side of things—at least to a certain extent. Hopefully what nosotros saw higher up, as well as the company'southward announcements around Warhammer: Total State of war and Ashes of the Singularity that we mentioned before, are indications that this is already happening.

Plus, allow's not forget: Even if y'all are gaming on a 1080p screen, the at-or-near-triple-digit performance we saw in testing is nevertheless very smooth, and close enough to what Intel delivers that you lot'd demand both a very fast monitor and extremely expert eyesight to see the divergence. Down in the existent world where well-nigh of us still game, in the 60fps range, what AMD delivers here is more than "good enough" for serious gaming.

Conclusion

Our sole reservation with the four-core, $189 Ryzen 5 1500X was that the half dozen-core Ryzen 5 1600 was available for an actress $forty. That fabricated the six-core CPU a proffer probably worth stepping upwardly to if y'all practice time-consuming CPU-focused tasks like video editing and transcoding with any regularity. Ryzen's primary forcefulness against its Intel-based competition is more cores and threads for your coin. So if that appeals to you, spending a little more to get six of them (and 12 calculating threads) is worth paying a niggling more than for.

But that equation doesn't work so well with the Ryzen 5 1600X. You certainly could pace upward to the Ryzen 7 1700 and get viii cores instead of "simply" vi. Merely the price gap between the $249 Ryzen 5 1600X and the $319 Ryzen seven 1700 is a more substantial $70. And the Ryzen 7 1700 has a much lower 3GHz base clock compared to the iii.6GHz base of the Ryzen vii 1700. The Ryzen 7 chip's boost clock of 3.7GHz is as well lower than the 4GHz the Ryzen v can achieve (or iv.1GHz with an ample cooler, thanks to the XFR feature that the Ryzen 7 1700 lacks). You'd have to footstep up to the flagship Ryzen vii 1800X to get similar clock speeds and 2 more cores than the Ryzen v 1600X, and that chip costs twice equally much ($499) as the 1600X.

Unless y'all really need those actress cores and threads for professional purposes, or money really isn't an issue, the Ryzen 5 1600X comes off as much more sensible bit, and arguably the all-time value in the Ryzen lineup that nosotros've seen to appointment. That said, if you don't often detect yourself waiting for your organization to finish tackling CPU-intensive tasks and you're primarily interested in gaming, it may exist smarter to pace down to the Ryzen 5 1500X. But if you lot're subsequently an excellent residue of cost, multi-thread CPU performance, gaming, and computing overhead for the enervating tasks you might make up one's mind to put your PC up to tomorrow, the Ryzen five 1600X is very tough to vanquish.

Editors' Note: Parts of this review appeared previously in our review of the AMD Ryzen five 1500X.

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Further Reading

• Intel'due south 'Comet Lake-S' Desktop CPUs Offer Up to 10 Cores of Computing Musculus
• v Ways AMD Is Chirapsia Intel in Desktop CPUs
• AMD Launches Its 'Fastest Ever' Ryzen three Desktop Processors
• Intel'due south 10th Generation H-Serial Core CPUs, 'Comet Lake-H,' Arrive in Laptops This Month
• Testing 'Renoir': AMD's Mobile Ryzen 9 CPU Shows Major Muscle for Laptops

Source: https://sea.pcmag.com/chipsets-processors/15357/amd-ryzen-5-1600x-review

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