AMD Ryzen 5 1500X
Can Ryzen maintain the magic with just four cores?
More cores, threads and performance for less money. That’s the killer proposition for AMD’s new Ryzen CPU. Suddenly, most of Intel’s desktop processor range looks overpriced and short on punch.
But does that thinking extend to this, the new Ryzen 5 1500X, with its mere four cores and eight threads? After all, Intel has plenty of mainstream quadcore chips, and as good as Ryzen undoubtedly is, Intel still has the edge on a per-core basis.
Initially, the 1500X looks competitive, if not quite the knockout option of the sixand eight-core models. At $275, it lines up roughly against the Intel Core i5-7400. That’s a quad-core, quad-thread model, with a 3GHz base clock and 3.5GHz Turbo speed. Ryzen chips aren’t directly comparable in terms of clock speed, but with a 3.5GHz base clock and 3.7GHz turbo speed, the 1500X has a little extra in hand to offset Ryzen’s perclock deficiency — it’s fully unlocked, theoretically allowing for even more frequency advantage where Intel keeps most of its chips locked down.
Of course, you could argue that, if you’re going with Intel, you’d be crazy not to grab the Core i5-7500 for just $10 more, what with its 3.4GHz base clock and 3.8GHz Turbo speed. And it’s that kind of calculation that eventually undoes the 1500X.
Let’s have a sniff around the 1500X’s prowess in our performance benchmarks. Like the other Ryzen chips we’ve sampled, multithreading is where it hits hardest. At over 800 points in Cinebench, it batters the much more expensive Intel Core i5-7600K. The 1500X is quicker than the 7600K in Fry Render, too, albeit by a pretty small margin, though it’s more or less a dead heat in x265 video encoding. In other words, it’ll absolutely beast those price-parity Core i5-7400 and 7500 processors in anything that’s multithreaded.
The exception is gaming. Many titles tend to be GPUlimited at the resolutions gamers are likely to be using. But where a game is CPU-limited, Intel chips still have the edge, though it’s worth noting that this quadcore Ryzen delivers the same frame rate in Total War: Attila as the six-core 1600X. Over time, as game developers get their heads around AMD’s new Zen architecture, the gap may narrow. For now, though, gaming is Ryzen’s one obvious weakness.
Nearly everywhere else, however, Ryzen is damn quick. The 1500X also impressed, in relative terms, in our overclocking tests. We managed a straightforward and stable 4.1GHz, or a 400MHz overclock, a useful 10% boost.
So the question is: does the 1500X have enough gusto to make it a good budget option, or is it worth stretching a little further to the 1600 or 1600X? With the latter, you’re getting 50% more cores and slightly faster clocks. What’s more, with any Ryzen processor, you’re almost certainly going to need a new motherboard and RAM. That means an investment in the region of $600. In that context, an extra $30–$75 for a lot more performance is surely the better choice.
A few years down the road, when some of us have existing systems with AMD’s new AM4 socket, the value calculation will look different. But for now, and considering the total cost of going with a new Ryzen rig, this particular 1500X chip is a hard sell.