Compare Ryzen 7 1700 to Ryzen 5 2600?

[LinuxDevice]

I was looking at CPUs for gaming which would be good, but not the best...money is important. Along those lines I see a Ryzen 5 2600 with 6 cores and 3.4GHz base clock. I also see a Ryzen 7 1700 with 8 cores and a slightly lower base core clock of 3.0Ghz (and only slightly more expensive). 8 cores would not necessarily make this faster with games not using 8 cores, but it would add some length to its usable life and perhaps help with recording or streaming of games.

Obviously individual core clocks matter for gaming, but I'm wondering if the Ryzen 7 architecture might make up at least partially versus the Ryzen 5 and thus make core clocks a bad comparison of actual performance. Can anyone suggest how much worse this Ryzen 7 would be in comparison to the faster Ryzen 5 if both are used in the same game which only uses 6 cores? 3.0GHz is quite a bit slower than 3.4GHz if both cores are the same, but I don't know if the cores perform differently at a given base clock.

 

[jojesa]

I have used them both in the same motherboard and Ryzen 5 2600 performed better in all games.
There could be 4 to 21 FPS difference depending on the game.
Most games do not use more than 4 cores, but they prefer higher core speed.

 

[richiestang_78]

I honestly wouldn't bother with the 1700 unless you can find one for a good deal. There are some bench marks available but here is another forum post about it with the first reply being a good summary.

http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-3758281/ryzen-1700-ryzen-2600.html


Aside from the performance difference of the two, the first gen Ryzens are also much pickier about RAM speed as well as brand and model I woulc personally get the 2600 with a B450 motherboard if gaming is your primary goal. Also the Ryzen 2600 is on sale on newegg for 164 USD.

 

[LinuxDevice]

Thank you both for your answers! It looks like I will stick to six cores. I might add a new thread later for comparison to an Intel CPU, but the thought that a less expensive 2600 could be upgraded later to a 2700x or even a newer generation as they show up has a lot of weight in choices (especially since they announced the next gen Ryzen will work on the same socket even if only PCIe v3 is available).