AMD Ryzen 5 1600X CPU Review

[ohim]

You guys really need to add a Radeon GPU in the mix on all Ryzen chips ... on Anandtech in the Rocket League game the Ryzen on a GTX 1080 performed worse than Ryzen on RX 480.

There is clearly something wrong in this combination.

 

[Terry Perry]

I hooked up my I-3 "2 CORE" 560 OC to 3.8 with 8 G ram and my R9 Fury ran B-1 and Titan 2 at 1900 Res and Not ONE hang up. Blows threw Steam Games I have 2 I-7 and 2500 and a 4670 DC. Just to Show you ALL the B.S. about Gaming.

 

[Guest]

As I said before 1600x, 1500, 1400 won't overclock better than 1700, 1700x, 1800x in other words you get same gaming performance and worse in productivity due the lack of cores.

 

[Antonio_34]

If you want to test gaming performance on a Ryzen then don't use an Nvidia GPU. None of these game tests are indicative of Ryzen true performance as Nvidia has a botched implementation of DX12 and Ryzen support.

This is like the second time I've mentioned this to you, Tom's hardware, and it's all over the internet. It seems like your reviewers are out of touch with common industry news and either choose not to or neglect to provide unbiased information.

 

[ammaross]

Test with a Radeon GPU. If you want to "remove the GPU bottleneck," try a pair of RX480 in crossfire. I'm not saying do all your gaming benches with this. Make a new page comparing the Ryzen CPU vs even just one i5/i7 showing performance differences between the 1080 and Radeons. You'll see some interesting things happen!

 

[lsatenstein]

I am not a gamer. The only game I relax with is freecell.

I write code, I do many compiles, and I am able to do that quite well with a 2008 q9650 Intel system. But my system is slow for sata (sata3), has USB2 only support, and a 256meg graphics card. Given my growing workstation use, I am looking at setting a budget of $700-$800, and looking at what I can get for that money. , I do everything with Linux.

I do realize that many Intel systems include the built-in graphics chip. That is a plus for Intel. With AMD, I have to add a graphics card. That expense takes subtracts from AMD's advantage.

If both Intel and AMD systems I end up choosing require me to purchase a discrete graphics card, then my outlook is less in favour of Intel. This new desktop system has to last me 5-6 years.

So, lets see a comparison between the two vendors based on price. Consider 16gigs ddr4 2900 ram

 

[FormatC]

Test with a Radeon GPU. If you want to "remove the GPU bottleneck," try a pair of RX480 in crossfire. I'm not saying do all your gaming benches with this. Make a new page comparing the Ryzen CPU vs even just one i5/i7 showing performance differences between the 1080 and Radeons. You'll see some interesting things happen!

If you compare the frame-times and variances with such a MGPU-construct, you will move back very fast to a single card. A FPS value can't say you anything about the real user experience. You ever tried two 480 in Crossfire? I did. And it was it not worth (micro-stuttering, > 350 watts power consumption). I'm very sensitive for uneveness.

It is not our fault, that AMD has currently only mid-class VGA cards. But we will check it with Vega again.

 

[Petaflox]

Good testing, showing strength and weakness of Ryzen cpu, one more thing I'm
interesting to know, how much is the cpu utilization during games testing?
Since AMD claim not full optimization of Ryzen..................

 

[larkspur]

Games will also be going this direction. You can do more faster with more cores, even if those cores aren't amazing (like Intel's cores). There is no beating this. This means for the next year or more Intel will be behind AMD in multicore applications.. but I'd expect Intel's response to be impressive.

I had to check and make sure I was reading the Ryzen review comments. This sounds exactly like a comment from the Bulldozer review. But with Ryzen I agree especially from a value-perspective. But games are still a long way from being optimized for more than four threads. We'll continue to see 4 core high-IPC CPUs beating higher-core-count lower-IPC CPUs for quite some time. We are just starting to see developers require more than 2C/2T CPUs... Don't forget that the typical Mr. Average Joe Gamer is still on a 4-thread CPU... and developers know this. Game-graphics enhancements are mostly coming from more powerful GPUs. DX12 and Vulkan are helping too, but mostly by being closer to the metal and cutting out CPU overhead. This is why many benchmarks are showing that systems with weaker CPUs benefit more from these newer APIs.

What these reviews do show, and this is where the author ultimately fails, is that Ryzen is fast enough to play games at high resolution, without noticing any real difference in performance. Future games that are programmed for mutlicores will run faster on a Ryzen CPU with more cores than on the comparable Intel offering with fewer cores. This article shows this.

In other words, when you have a GPU bottleneck at high resolutions, performance isn't linked to the CPU. This article is examining CPU performance, not GPU performance. Take a look at the Civ VI AI test - 45 threads yet a stock 4C/4T Kaby Lake beats an 8C/16T Ryzen. Even the 6C/12T Ryzen beats the 8C/16T Ryzen. Games are and will continue to be inconsistent with core/thread scaling. No doubt, there are a few outliers and I'm sure that this will eventually change. But if you talk to any game developer you will learn that this will be true for the foreseeable future.

So the final comment should be, would you rather spend $240 on a chip (not to mention motherboard and ram) that is going to be slow as molasses running games optimized for multiple cores next year, or do you want to pay $249 for a chip that will only get faster from year to year as more and more software is designed for multicore processing.

No modern desktop four core Intel will be slow as molasses in next year's games or the year after games. Ryzen's relative performance should improve, but certainly not in every game released. I'm not entirely disagreeing with you - I'm just pointing out that you are being entirely too inaccurately-sensationalist for a techy comment section. It's borderline fanboyism.

At this point the decision is simple. Intel as it is right now, is selling yesterday's technology.
If you buy a computer to last 1 year, then buy Intel. But if you want something that will last 5 years and still be able to play games at high resolution then your ONLY option is buy a Ryzen. There is no escaping this fact, it's the single common comment by most technical reviewers, including this one. He clearly states that Intel is benefiting from software designed to run single-core processors.

Not even a shred of truth in those statements. Intel sells 2, 4 , 6 and 8-core CPUs (excluding Xeons). These are cutting-edge designs that perform consistently and reliably in today and tomorrow's applications. Intel's continued superior IPC, memory-controllers and clockspeeds give their CPUs better performance in most lightly-threaded applications. What you seem to not understand is that lightly-threaded applications are commonplace all over the software world today and aren't going to magically change overnight. Architecturally, software doesn't change as quickly as you seem to think. That being said, clearly AMD is offering superior value to those who are running well-threaded applications. No one can deny that is awesome!

If you buy Intel you're literally throwing your money in the toilet. with respect to the future performance of your new computer.

Fanboyism at its finest. There is literally nothing that is true in that statement.

 

[zodiacfml]

there should be a mid-tier GPU there such as the RX480. anyway, thank's for the overclocked i5. the Ryzen chip doesn't seem to be a good value for me unless I use handbrake or encoding tasks everyday. the AMD chips doesn't have integrated GPu which can be useful at times.

 

[cryoburner]

If you can reliably overclock any of the ryzen 5/7 to 4.0, why would you get the 1600x over the 1700? Comparing a 1600x at 4.0 to a 1700 at 3.0 and then concluding that it's a better CPU when the 1700 can overclock exactly the same seems pretty stupid

I suppose the main reason to get the 1600x over the 1700 is that it costs $70 less, which is a pretty substantial difference for anyone not making much use of those extra two cores. For someone buying a CPU primarily for gaming, or for most other uses, even the 1600x's six cores are not yet being fully utilized. And of course, not everyone wants to tinker with overclocking, and void their processor's warranty, in which case the 1600x provides faster out-of-box performance under most common scenarios.

And if you're going to overclock, the same could be said for the 1600, which costs another $30 less, or a full $100 less than the 1700. Moving from the 1600 to the 1700, you're paying 45% more for 33% more cores/threads, and aside from in a very limited selection of software, you're not going to see anywhere close to a 33% boost in performance. By comparison, moving up from the 1500x to the 1600 only costs about 16% more for 50% more cores/threads, or 29% more moving from the 1400 to the 1600, though in that case you're also getting more L3 cache.

It seems to me that the 1600/1600x might be the sweet-spot of the Ryzen lineup for most usage scenarios. You get per-thread performance that's comparable to the Ryzen 7 series, but without paying a substantial premium for additional cores that most people won't likely get much use out of anyway. You still get a couple more cores than the 1400/1500x though, and three times the threads of competing Core-i5s, which should provide some additional room to grow as applications continue to utilize more threads in the years to come. I can't help but think that the 4 core, 4 thread design of the i5-7500/7600k will begin showing its limitations in gaming performance before long, and it also seems likely that Ryzen's gaming performance in general will improve once developers have Ryzen hardware on hand to test with and optimize for during a game's development. And of course, socket AM4 will likely continue to be supported with new generations of processors for at least a few years, so anyone looking to upgrade their CPU down the line might have better options to work with without replacing their motherboard as well.

 

[mitch074]

"high price compared with i5 7600K" - well, it depends on where you are (here in France, the 7600 non-K is more expensive than the 1600X), but more important, considering the 1600 (non-X) is less expensive than the 7600K and can overclock too, I wonder why a website that used to cater to overclockers took the CPU least likely to be bought by overclockers and opposed it to Intel's O/C-friendly CPU.
If you take the 1600 (non-X) and compare it to the 7600K, the only "con" is "it doesn't overclock as high" but you can add "comes with a bundled cooler that allows overclock" and thus a "price-performance ratio for the whole platform that's hard to beat".

 

[RCFProd]

Test with a Radeon GPU. If you want to "remove the GPU bottleneck," try a pair of RX480 in crossfire. I'm not saying do all your gaming benches with this. Make a new page comparing the Ryzen CPU vs even just one i5/i7 showing performance differences between the 1080 and Radeons. You'll see some interesting things happen!

In only a few specific titles. This ''interesting'' aspect only works on 1 or 2 out of 30 games. Rise of the Tomb Raider one of the very few examples.

 

[bernardv]

These benchmarks make no sense - just games, games, games. This way Intel is mostly ahead, but the difference is negligible. In any case, all games are primarily GPU bound, so who cares. If you would do a proper set of test, the picture would be quite different. Is Tom's a gaming hardware website?

 

[RCFProd]

These benchmarks make no sense - just games, games, games. This way Intel is mostly ahead, but the difference is negligible. In any case, all games are primarily GPU bound, so who cares. If you would do a proper set of test, the picture would be quite different. Is Tom's a gaming hardware website?

31 workstation benchmarks on page 10 ffs

 

[spdragoo]

You guys really need to add a Radeon GPU in the mix on all Ryzen chips ... on Anandtech in the Rocket League game the Ryzen on a GTX 1080 performed worse than Ryzen on RX 480.

There is clearly something wrong in this combination.

If you want to test gaming performance on a Ryzen then don't use an Nvidia GPU. None of these game tests are indicative of Ryzen true performance as Nvidia has a botched implementation of DX12 and Ryzen support.

This is like the second time I've mentioned this to you, Tom's hardware, and it's all over the internet. It seems like your reviewers are out of touch with common industry news and either choose not to or neglect to provide unbiased information.

Test with a Radeon GPU. If you want to "remove the GPU bottleneck," try a pair of RX480 in crossfire. I'm not saying do all your gaming benches with this. Make a new page comparing the Ryzen CPU vs even just one i5/i7 showing performance differences between the 1080 and Radeons. You'll see some interesting things happen!

It's already been tested...

http://www.techspot.com/article/1374-amd-ryzen-with-amd-gpu/

The only "variance" they found involved DirectX 12, which is already a known issue with nVidia GPUs that affects their use with all CPUs (Intel chips, non-Ryzen AMD chips, & Ryzen chips alike).

 

[somebodyspecial]

Since 50% of us still use win7 (no not some version of win8, I said win7), why not benchmark at least one machine with this to see if results are the same. I'm sure many want to know since many of us do not plan on moving to anything related to win10 at least until 2020 or later (and am hoping it's a REAL win7 replacement by then, not a 10 variant, or I move on probably)...LOL. DX12 is useless to me and that is all win10 has I'd probably ever need (Vulkan will take care of that for me at some point). At least you did the benchmarks where most people play (1080P).

 

[bernardv]

...

31 workstation benchmarks on page 10 ffs

Yes, there is 1 page of workstation tests, but there are 4 pages of mostly irrelevant, GPU bound gaming tests. One wonders if this was a GPU or a CPU review.

 

[RCFProd]

...

31 workstation benchmarks on page 10 ffs

Yes, there is 1 page of workstation tests, but there are 4 pages of mostly irrelevant, GPU bound gaming tests. One wonders if this was a GPU or a CPU review.

CPU matters atleast as much as the GPU in gaming. Plus, there aren't more gaming benchmarks, they've just been tested in-depthly per title. Quantity wise there are more workstation based benchmarks.

Besides, RYZEN 5 is more positioned for gaming in the first place. RYZEN 7 is the most intended for workstation use.

 

[80-watt Hamster]

...

31 workstation benchmarks on page 10 ffs

Yes, there is 1 page of workstation tests, but there are 4 pages of mostly irrelevant, GPU bound gaming tests. One wonders if this was a GPU or a CPU review.

By my count, there are benchmarks from 11 games and related software, and 17 productivity applications (14 if you lump the Adobe CC components into one title). There's more data to display from a game benchmark as executed here, hence more screen space.

 

[chibiwings]

Intel Performs better on games struggles on sandbox processess on a browser.

 

[redgarl]

Anandtech just put some bench and found some interesting information.

1. AMD works better with... AMD... weird random FPS at 1080p are gone with an RX480.

2. Nvidia is having driver issues with AMD new CPUs in some games.

3. We already knew it, but with an RX480 and a GTX1060, the 1080p benches are close and even trading, especially with Ryzen and RX480.

Well, if your 1080p game benches methodology weren't so useless, you would have seen that. This is what happening when you only give a single side of the story.

You should give me a job, I would do way better than what you guys are doing. It's unacceptable with the amount of hardware at your discretion. By the way, I am an electrical engineer, just saying if you would like to play the "you don't have a clue" card.

It's 3 sites saying otherwise! Kitguru is also stating something similar. Seriously, your reviews need to be reformatted and your methodology analyzed thoroughly.

 

[RCFProd]

Anandtech just put some bench and found some interesting information.

1. AMD works better with... AMD... weird random FPS at 1080p are gone with an RX480.

2. Nvidia is having driver issues with AMD new CPUs in some games.

3. We already knew it, but with an RX480 and a GTX1060, the 1080p benches are close and even trading, especially with Ryzen and RX480.

Well, if your 1080p game benches methodology weren't so useless, you would have seen that. This is what happening when you only give a single side of the story.

You should give me a job, I would do way better than what you guys are doing. It's unacceptable with the amount of hardware at your discretion. By the way, I am an electrical engineer, just saying if you would like to play the "you don't have a clue" card.

It's 3 sites saying otherwise! Kitguru is also stating something similar. Seriously, your reviews need to be reformatted and your methodology analyzed thoroughly.

Can you believe the tone of your own post? People are mad, I'm telling you. The arrogance in your tone is crazy. You would know that only a few games are affected with worse performance on Nvidia cards. Not all games.

Just absolutely absolutely embarrassing really.

Do you know how much effort it takes to do so much testing and reviewing? You wouldn't be able to review it most likely, because if you did you wouldn't be slagging off this review as much.

 

[elbert]

Odd thing I noticed about this review is the Ashes of the Singlarity fps is nearly a full frame slower. The optimzation review shows even the 7600K old score faster. Is this due to an Intel faster RAM issue or some other parts? Did the old reviews use RAM faster than 3200 on the Intel rigs? I totally understand the 1600X only matching the old 1800X score due to 2 less cores.

 

[Paul Alcorn]

Anandtech just put some bench and found some interesting information.

1. AMD works better with... AMD... weird random FPS at 1080p are gone with an RX480.

2. Nvidia is having driver issues with AMD new CPUs in some games.

3. We already knew it, but with an RX480 and a GTX1060, the 1080p benches are close and even trading, especially with Ryzen and RX480.

Well, if your 1080p game benches methodology weren't so useless, you would have seen that. This is what happening when you only give a single side of the story.

You should give me a job, I would do way better than what you guys are doing. It's unacceptable with the amount of hardware at your discretion. By the way, I am an electrical engineer, just saying if you would like to play the "you don't have a clue" card.

It's 3 sites saying otherwise! Kitguru is also stating something similar. Seriously, your reviews need to be reformatted and your methodology analyzed thoroughly.

Just to be precise, your main opposition to our methodology is that we aren't using an AMD GPU?

Do you believe that others would then make the same complaint about Intel CPUs not working as well with AMD GPUs? With, of course, the notable complaint that because AMD has control over the drivers it could hobble (or not optimize for) the Intel processors?

Does Intel have control over Nvidia drivers, or would you think Nvidia is the neutral choice when comparing CPUs?