Amd’s Ryzen 5 Cpus Reviewed, Part Two
Every Ryzen CPU in our tests seems about as efficient as similarly-priced Intel CPUs, and that’s a huge leap forward for AMD compared to the bad old days of the FX-8350 and friends. Builders won’t have to trade power efficiency for performance when they choose a Ryzen CPU to power their systems. First, let’s look at idle power consumption for each system in our test lineup. These measurements will vary with the host motherboard and the connected devices attached to a system, so we’d caution putting too much stock in them. Still, the Ryzen systems consume just a few more watts than comparable Intel chips do at idle.
Aside from excellent choice, you can go all out with up to 64 cores and 128 threads. If you need some serious computing performance, these are the chips for you. The Ryzen 9 family of CPUs is a new addition to AMD’s desktop processor lineup, offering amazing performance levels with up to 16 cores and 32 threads.
If you want a big spreadsheet that shows the difference in clock speed between Intel and AMD Ryzen CPUs, we’ve got that. If you want a breakdown of the price-difference between AMD Ryzen and Intel CPUs, we’ve got that. It works great with my RTX 2080 Super with no bottlenecks at all. I snagged this Ryzen processor for $169 and it is about 40% faster than my old Intel while consuming the same energy.
AMD Ryzen Master provides you with up to four custom, user-defined profiles to store CPU, GPU, and DDR4 memory configurations. You can adjust the number of active cores and memory timings as well as optimize general performance or fine tune for your favorite applications. The idea that hardware sites all have stockpiles of every system imaginable and the thousands of hours it would take to constantly setup and run all the new games and benchmarks is pretty comical.
I recall way back in the Athlon days that Via’s chipsets — specifically the KT133A and later KT266 had the best memory performance, and that’s why people stuck with them despite being considerably more flakey than AMD’s own 760 chipset. I also recall on the early Athlon chipsets that hacking them to enable interleaving gave a massive performance boost on games of the day that were bottlenecked by main memory bandwidth (e.g. Q3A.) Ahh, nostalgia. At 3200MT/s it looks like AMD has pretty much addressed the issue of having generally weaker memory controller performance. Sure there’s still a bit more latency but it’s nice to know you’re not getting something much less than what you’d get from the other company that has bajillions more to throw at R&D. I have to think it’ll have some form of L3, and it also seems like the path of least resistance is to just plug a single quad-core CCX into the design. So my guess is that it’ll have 8MB of L3 and talk to the integrated graphics over the infinity fabric.
Ryzen 3000 processors from AMD are built on the already excellent Zen-based family of CPUs. The newer Zen 2 architecture rolled out in 2019 was an essential next step for AMD, improving single and multi-core processing performance, as well as reducing overall power draw. Comparing the performance numbers of the new Ryzen 3000 series against the previous generation Ryzen CPUs shows gains in gaming and general computing. In a nutshell, the AMD Ryzen 5 is a range of 12-thread desktop processors that features a 64-bit quad and 86 Hexa-cores. Each chip within this series is based on Zen architecture, which is AMD’s third architectural design.
All these games were running at 1080p resolution and the graphics settings were set to have the best visual fidelity. In 3DMark’s GPU-centric FireStrike stress test, the Lenovo Legion 5 managed to score 8534 that puts it in the same league as many other laptops in this price range. The GPU was able to hit a max clock speed of 1755MHz during the stress test. That’s more in line with the reported clock speed of the GPU under load. Even if you look at benchmarks from that time, Intel generally kept up with or beat the Phenoms and their integrated memory controller in terms of memory bandwidth. The memory controller on AMD hardware has never been worth much until now.
The app can take advantage of AVX2 instructions on compatible CPUs. We chose the “bmw27” test file from Blender’s selection of benchmark scenes to put our CPUs through their paces. Intel’s Skylake and Kaby Lake CPUs bunch up at the top of these charts thanks to their killer combo of high single-threaded performance and high clocks. What’s most interesting is how closely the Ryzen X, the Ryzen X, and Ryzen X cluster, especially in the Jetstream benchmark. Whether you’re paying $190, $250, or $460 for a CPU in the Ryzen family, you can expect the same general snappiness in lightly-threaded tasks.
All in all, you have to choose the right CPU depending on your own usage, not based on benchmarks or what other people recommend. Precision Boost Overdrive works with your motherboard to boost clock speeds and lets you overclock with a single click. Just to make this crystal clear, the reason they HAVE to use older games is because all of the PAST data has been run using those games.
But overall, if you’re just looking to game, the Ryzen X offers up record-setting value in a way that only AMD can to close out 2020. The Ryzen X is a six-core shredder that smooths over the last of the few flaws we saw from gtx 1090 Zen 2 and the Ryzen X, and it solidifies AMD as the premier desktop CPU manufacturer of 2020 in every way. However, in those cases, the higher boost-clock ceilings didn’t always translate to real-world gains in performance.