Ryzen 5 3600
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.
The Gigabyte X99-Designare EX motherboard hosting our Core i7-6800K is notorious for high power consumption at idle thanks to its PLX PCI Express multiplexer, so it should be considered an outlier. Euler3D hungers for memory bandwidth, and only the Core i7-6800K can truly sate it. The Broadwell-E chip roughly doubles the performance of its six-core Ryzen competition. While the Ryzen s can still put up a fair fight with the Core i5-7600K and Core i7-7700K, they simply can’t match Broadwell-E’s quad-channel memory bandwidth. Putting the CPU and graphics card together shows some differences among CPUs, but the results are largely close together except at the extremes of the chart.
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 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.
These new 000 processors are still based on the same 7nm manufacturing process as the Ryzen 3000 chips that hit the market in 2019. Announced a couple of weeks ago, the new AMD Ryzen 3000XT models with increased clock frequencies should be available today in primary markets. Although AMD has retired the term “APU”, it is traditionally used to describe a CPU with an integrated GPU. Systems using a Ryzen APU will not need a dedicated or discrete graphics card. The AMD Ryzen family is an x86-64 microprocessor family from AMD, based on the Zen microarchitecture.
Strictly as a budget gaming engine, though, the $120 AMD Ryzen X frees up a hefty chunk of cash that could get shifted to a better graphics card or another stick of RAM without a ton of frame loss. Here’s what we saw in our bank of gaming tests with our GeForce RTX 2080 Ti card running the show. This top-end consumer graphics card is the primary arbiter of performance at 4K with all of the CPUs that we have laid out below. At 1080p, though, the card gets out of the way a bit more and lets the CPU differences shine.
The only downside is that unlike the Ryzen X, you cannot overclock the Intel chips and they also come with a lower cache. Motherboard makers do offer power limit overclocking but that will lead to higher temperatures and power consumption than the standard listed 65W TDP. AMD’s Ryzen X is now available at major online retailers and might just be the cheapest 6 core Zen CPU you can buy right now. The AMD Ryzen gtx 1080 8gb X was launched back in 2019 along with the Ryzen X and was then aimed at the 9th Gen Intel Core lineup. However, the lineup offers great performance to budget users and might be the best option for them if they’re eyeing a 6 core chip. Given the choice between a laptop with Ryzen Mobile and another with Intel’s 8th Gen Core , we’d choose whichever machine is the better value at the time you’re shopping.
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.