AMD Ryzen 5 1600 CPU Review

[Guest]

Ryzen 5 1600 brings six cores and twelve threads to the lowest price point in the desktop market, an example of the inherent value of its unlocked multipliers.

AMD Ryzen 5 1600 CPU Review : Read more

 

[AgentLozen]

I've been reading the reviews for the various Ryzen models including this one. I just have to say that it's soooo refreshing seeing AMD go toe to toe with Intel once again. We haven't seen a close race in years.

 

[DavidDisciple]

10-4. I was soooooo sick of hearing Intel fanboys brag and belittle AMD and now the tide has turned. It's great to see AMD providing some serious competition and a brand new architecture. It's also great to see an AMD 1st generation processor beat a 7th generation Intel processor.

 

[barryv88]

Finally! Took you guys very long to bring out this article - in what is described by many, the little champ of the Ryzen launch so far. The 1600.
Can't wait to get mine!

 

[elbert]

Great review but the big gun was a no show. The 1600's stock cooler and can it do 3.7~3.8Ghz. How does that effect the game price effenciency if we add in cooler costs? How does streaming or just recording the game play for later upload effect performance? How about an older game like CSGO while recording? Can we have a part 2 to this review with these and other tests?

 

[barryv88]

Great review but the big gun was a no show. The 1600's stock cooler and can it do 3.7~3.8Ghz. How does that effect the game price effenciency if we add in cooler costs? How does streaming or just recording the game play for later upload effect performance? How about an older game like CSGO while recording? Can we have a part 2 to this review with these and other tests?

You can check out Bitwit's vid on streaming/recording performance where Ryzen wins rather dramatically. The 7700 is really humbled, given that its 4 extra theads over the i5's don't help either.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXeenX0FZAY

 

[ZRace]

@Elbert: When streaming, more use is usually being made of having more cores/threads available, so I'd guess the Ryzen CPUs yield better game streaming results compared to pure gaming results when comparing the to the current i5's.

 

[darth_adversor]

I'm not an Intel fanboy by any means (I think it's fantastic that AMD is going head-to-head with Intel again), but for gaming, minimum frame-rate data is so much more important than average. The article does make a mention of that toward the end, but I don't think it was emphasized nearly as much as it should have been. I really want AMD to succeed (I was AMD all the way throughout the socket 754, 939, AM2/3 days), but if you look past the author's positive spin, I think the Core i5's are really the way to go for gaming.

Hopefully that will change as the platform matures and the software catches up. I'm still sitting on a 2500k, probably gonna hold out for one more generation before I upgrade. I'd love to go back to AMD.

 

[DavidDisciple]

Yeah, and things just keep getting better for Ryzen with all the game optimizations and updates for memory compatibility and manufacturers like ROG are adding them in their performance gaming systems. Things are looking pretty good for Ryzen.

 

[JocPro]

Hey, Paul: AMD has never said that non X processors lack XFR, they just have a more limited extra boost of 50-100 MHz instead of the 100-200 MHz in the X models...

 

[PaulAlcorn]

Hey, Paul: AMD has never said that non X processors lack XFR, they just have a more limited extra boost of 50-100 MHz instead of the 100-200 MHz in the X models...

I have marketing materials (reviewers guides, press releases, slides from briefings, etc.) that say, specifically and repetitively, that XFR is only on X SKUs.

 

[InvalidError]

if you look past the author's positive spin, I think the Core i5's are really the way to go for gaming.

For now and, in most cases, not by much.

Throw in any amount of productivity on top of gaming though and the R5-1600 is easily worth the slight gaming hit.

 

[Zapablast05]

BF1 frame time variance is from Resident Evil 7.

 

[10tacle]

Good showing by AMD. Intel was long overdue for serious competition again. The Ryzen is a much better all around choice for those looking for a balanced system for both gaming and productivity programs. Also keep in mind that at 1440p resolution in games, the 7600k's performance advantage that it has at 1080p dissipates even at overclock (there is a troubling big gap in minimum FPS specifically in Tomb Raider - hopefully that's just a fluke for that game only). Project Cars and the upcoming PCars 2 runs better on Intel chips, so that's not surprising.

Now speaking of overclocking, why keep mentioning that the 7600K doesn't come with a stock cooler whereas the 1600 does when you test with an aftermarket Noctua's NH-U12S for overclocking?

 

[PaulAlcorn]

BF1 frame time variance is from Resident Evil 7.

Good eye. So many charts, there was bound to be one stray The results are correct, that chart was mislabeled. Fixed!

 

[Sakkura]

It might be worth doing a few gaming performance tests with other software running.

Streaming (software-based) is the more extreme example, but even having Discord, a browser, and a few other things running in the background could be trouble for a Core i5 trying to keep up with a 6-core Ryzen chip. And that is a more realistic workload than just a pure game on a clean Windows install.

 

[PaulAlcorn]

It might be worth doing a few gaming performance tests with other software running.

Streaming (software-based) is the more extreme example, but even having Discord, a browser, and a few other things running in the background could be trouble for a Core i5 trying to keep up with a 6-core Ryzen chip. And that is a more realistic workload than just a pure game on a clean Windows install.

Keep your eyes open for something very soon

 

[JocPro]

Hey, Paul: AMD has never said that non X processors lack XFR, they just have a more limited extra boost of 50-100 MHz instead of the 100-200 MHz in the X models...

I have marketing materials (reviewers guides, press releases, slides from briefings, etc.) that say, specifically and repetitively, that XFR is only on X SKUs.

Me and some fellow redditors just scourged for weeks over all the pre-release and leaked material trying to understand the meaning of the X, and the first hypothesis was towards XFR, but it wasn't explicit in any of the material that we had available. It was clear that X models have XFR, but nowhere it was said that non-X models didn't have it. Still I find it weird for you to point it out as an unknown this late in an article when the 1700 clearly supports XFR and was launched about 3 months ago...

 

[mitch074]

I have marketing materials (reviewers guides, press releases, slides from briefings, etc.) that say, specifically and repetitively, that XFR is only on X SKUs.

Technically, I must agree with JocPro. In practice though, XFR has a full 100MHz (some say, up to 200 MHz in extremely rare cases) range on 'X' parts, while it's limited to 50 MHz on non-X - thus, nothing to write home about.

It would have been interesting to take the boxed cooler into account, too: from what I could see, it's good up to 3.8 GHz, allowing to overclock the chip on the cheap and thus completely destroying the 7600K on the performance-price ratio as it goes from a 20 to 60 bucks difference.

Last note, you keep repeating that Intel has an IPC advantage over Ryzen; personally, it's more of a software optimization edge. Taking a single-threaded, heavily-optimized but using only "basic" instruction set software like Lame, and comparing the 4 GHz Ryzen with 5 GHz Kaby Lake, the latter has 20% better clock speed but doesn't get 20% more performance over Ryzen. For tasks like MP3 compression that easily take place essentially in-cache, the rest of the system can be quite easily ignored.

From what I could find, Ryzen is good to excellent in basic x86, FPU, SSE1-3, but has some progress to do on SSE4.x. AES is probably the most glaring performance dark spot on the chip, being roughly half as fast as Kaby...

But then, I've yet to see anyone finding out the actual strengths and weaknesses of the processor; Tom's used to do that, but it's been a while.

 

[PaulAlcorn]

Hey, Paul: AMD has never said that non X processors lack XFR, they just have a more limited extra boost of 50-100 MHz instead of the 100-200 MHz in the X models...

I have marketing materials (reviewers guides, press releases, slides from briefings, etc.) that say, specifically and repetitively, that XFR is only on X SKUs.

Me and some fellow redditors just scourged for weeks over all the pre-release and leaked material trying to understand the meaning of the X, and the first hypothesis was towards XFR, but it wasn't explicit in any of the material that we had available. It was clear that X models have XFR, but nowhere it was said that non-X models didn't have it. Still I find it weird for you to point it out as an unknown this late in an article when the 1700 clearly supports XFR and was launched about 3 months ago...

Here, have a look at my watermarked reviewers guide.
.
http://i517.photobucket.com/albums/u332/paullie1/XFR1.jpg

http://i517.photobucket.com/albums/u332/paullie1/XFR2.jpg

 

[Midwest_1]

Hey Paul I have a ryzen build that actually is very competitive. However something is definitely wrong with your specs vs. Benchmarks. My specs as followed:
Ryzen 5 1600 clocked at 3.8 cuz
Corsair vengeance lpx 3200 memory clocked at 2666
Corsair rm750 power supply
Asrock x370 fatality k4 gaming
Asus strix rx580 o.c. mode

Benchmarks:
GTA5 68 FRAMES AVERAGE
SHADOWS OF MORDOR 76 FRAMES AVERAGE

Explain how a 1080 fe edition barely beats the rx580

 

[PaulAlcorn]

I have marketing materials (reviewers guides, press releases, slides from briefings, etc.) that say, specifically and repetitively, that XFR is only on X SKUs.

Technically, I must agree with JocPro. In practice though, XFR has a full 100MHz (some say, up to 200 MHz in extremely rare cases) range on 'X' parts, while it's limited to 50 MHz on non-X - thus, nothing to write home about.

It would have been interesting to take the boxed cooler into account, too: from what I could see, it's good up to 3.8 GHz, allowing to overclock the chip on the cheap and thus completely destroying the 7600K on the performance-price ratio as it goes from a 20 to 60 bucks difference.

Last note, you keep repeating that Intel has an IPC advantage over Ryzen; personally, it's more of a software optimization edge. Taking a single-threaded, heavily-optimized but using only "basic" instruction set software like Lame, and comparing the 4 GHz Ryzen with 5 GHz Kaby Lake, the latter has 20% better clock speed but doesn't get 20% more performance over Ryzen. For tasks like MP3 compression that easily take place essentially in-cache, the rest of the system can be quite easily ignored.

From what I could find, Ryzen is good to excellent in basic x86, FPU, SSE1-3, but has some progress to do on SSE4.x. AES is probably the most glaring performance dark spot on the chip, being roughly half as fast as Kaby...

But then, I've yet to see anyone finding out the actual strengths and weaknesses of the processor; Tom's used to do that, but it's been a while.

During the AMD briefings in Austin the company said they have lower IPC than Kaby Lake. Specifically, they said they are 6.8% back.

 

[Martell1977]

Hey Paul I have a ryzen build that actually is very competitive. However something is definitely wrong with your specs vs. Benchmarks. My specs as followed:
Ryzen 5 1600 clocked at 3.8 cuz
Corsair vengeance lpx 3200 memory clocked at 2666
Corsair rm750 power supply
Asrock x370 fatality k4 gaming
Asus strix rx580 o.c. mode

Benchmarks:
GTA5 68 FRAMES AVERAGE
SHADOWS OF MORDOR 76 FRAMES AVERAGE

Explain how a 1080 fe edition barely beats the rx580

It doesn't. If you look at the resolution in this article, they keep at 1080p to avoid potential GPU bottlenecks. They use the 1080 just to keep the GPU as a non-factor.

 

[PaulAlcorn]

Hey Paul I have a ryzen build that actually is very competitive. However something is definitely wrong with your specs vs. Benchmarks. My specs as followed:
Ryzen 5 1600 clocked at 3.8 cuz
Corsair vengeance lpx 3200 memory clocked at 2666
Corsair rm750 power supply
Asrock x370 fatality k4 gaming
Asus strix rx580 o.c. mode

Benchmarks:
GTA5 68 FRAMES AVERAGE
SHADOWS OF MORDOR 76 FRAMES AVERAGE

Explain how a 1080 fe edition barely beats the rx580

We got 74.5 with GTAV. I have literally every eye-candy option turned on. There are a lot of differences in the platforms there, so I can't give you a single definitive reason why it is only beating it by 9.56%.

I recorded 151.1 in Mordor, which is very close to double your score. I'm not understanding the issue there.

 

[JocPro]

Hey, Paul: AMD has never said that non X processors lack XFR, they just have a more limited extra boost of 50-100 MHz instead of the 100-200 MHz in the X models...

I have marketing materials (reviewers guides, press releases, slides from briefings, etc.) that say, specifically and repetitively, that XFR is only on X SKUs.

Me and some fellow redditors just scourged for weeks over all the pre-release and leaked material trying to understand the meaning of the X, and the first hypothesis was towards XFR, but it wasn't explicit in any of the material that we had available. It was clear that X models have XFR, but nowhere it was said that non-X models didn't have it. Still I find it weird for you to point it out as an unknown this late in an article when the 1700 clearly supports XFR and was launched about 3 months ago...

Here, have a look at my watermarked reviewers guide.
.
http://i517.photobucket.com/albums/u332/paullie1/XFR1.jpg

http://i517.photobucket.com/albums/u332/paullie1/XFR2.jpg

That's exactly what I'm talking about. It just implies that is not available in non-X processors by saying that it is available in X's and isn't available in all the lineup. As we still has to see the full lineup, maybe some R3 won't have it... Or maybe the Ryzen APUs?. It's not explicit or categorical. We had the same slides, by the way.