AMD Ryzen R5
Are six cores enough to recommend the R5?
As mentioned earlier, just as we’d finished our testing and writing of the Ryzen 7 coverage, we received an invite from AMD to head to Beijing for the official Ryzen 5 launch. This would allow us to test and write about the mid-range chips in just three days before the beloved binding of paper you’re now holding would be churned out at the printers. It’s a shame we couldn’t have had the Ryzen 5, prior to the Ryzen 7, as it’s arguably a better chip for PC gamers.
As you well know, the vast majority of games still only make use of four cores, so the larger number of cores found in the Ryzen 7 don’t tend to offer up noticeable gaming performance improvements unless you’re also streaming, recording or doing other stuff in the background. Hence why Ryzen 5 is more relevant to us lot – with either four or six cores, it’s a better fit for basic gaming. Let’s see which chips make up the Ryzen 5 product stack, and how they differ from the Ryzen 7.
RYZEN 5 IS COMPRISED OF 4
There are four chips that fall under the Ryzen 5 banner. At the top of the heap is the Ryzen 5 1600X, which will retail in Australia for $359. This puts it basically in competition with Intel’s i7-7700, which retails for just $40 more. It’s a six-cored part, and uses two of the CCX units found in the Ryzen 7 series – in fact, all of the Ryz en 5 chips do. However, in the 1600X, each CCX has a single core disabled. It still has 16MB of L3 cache, and 512k L2 cache per core. The Base speed is 3.6GHz, while the Boost speed is 4GHz – however, only two of the cores will boost to this speed. Under the right thermal conditions, its XFR support means you can squeeze a free 100MHz out of it, lifting the speed to 4.1GHz. Overall TDP is 95W.
Next up we have the Ryzen 5 1600, which will retail for just $319, putting it on par with Intel’s Core i5 7600K. This is basically identical to the 1600X with a couple of minor differences; firstly the base speed drops to 3.2GHz, while the Boost speed drops to 3.6GHz. There’s also no XFR support. As a result of the frequency drop, the TDP is lowered to 65W. Like all Ryzen chips it’s fully multiplier unlocked though, so hitting speeds of 4GHz shouldn’t be an issue.
The last two chips in the line-up drop the total core count to four cores each, yet they both still use two CCX units – it’s just that
two of the four cores in each have been disabled. The first is the Ryzen 5 1500X, which still has Simultaneous Multi-Threading, enabling a total of eight threads to be run concurrently. At a cost of just $275 it’s up against Intel’s Core i5 7600. It still has the 16MB of L3 cache of the other chips, but the Base frequency drops to 3.5GHz while Boost drops to 3.7GHz. However, the XFR on this chip is faster than every other Ryzen, with a potential maximum increase of 2GHz. That means this $275 CPU could hit 3.9GHz in the right conditions, making it a potent contender for best value chip in the range.
Finally we have the Ryzen 5 1400, which will retail for a mere $245, around the same price as Intel’s i5 7500. The major change here is a halving of the L3 cache, down to just 8MB, as well as frequency drops. The Base drops to 3.2GHz while the Boost is just 3.4GHz, so it’s not going to be much of a contender when compared to the quad-cored 3.8GHz i5 7500 in gaming. However, it does have SMT, so can run a full eight threads, unlike Intel’s competitor.
And there you have it – architecturally, they’re all identical to the Ryzen 7 CPUs in that they use the Zen core at their heart. It’s just that they’ve been de-cored, and had their frequencies altered. Everything else remains the same. So just how do they perform?
SIX-CORES ARE BETTER THAN FOUR
We tested our Ryzen 5 1600X against Intel’s i7-7700K. Even though Intel’s chip is $100 more expensive, it performs identically to the i7-7700, which is priced at just $40 more than the 1600X; it’s just not overclockable. We tested using the ASRock Fatal1ty AB350 Gaming K4 motherboard with BIOS 2.20, along with 2 x 8GB of the same Corsair memory used in the Ryzen 7 testing. As with the Ryzen 7, memory setup was a pain in the ass, even more so. Simply changing memory timings didn’t work – we had to enable the XMP setting, then manually adjust the memory speed to the Ryzen 5’s default of 2666MHz.
As our productivity and synthetic benchmarks show, the majority of which will eat as many cores as possible, the 1600X exceeded the performance of Intel’s chip. This is great news for those who want a cheap desktop for multi-threaded applications or multitasking. However, we wanted to dig deeper with gaming performance with this chip, and the results weren’t stellar. Unlike most reviewers, we test at low resolution and with GPU-intensive features disabled, so that it’s the CPU that is carrying the load. This is done so that we can test the CPU in isolation, so that in times in a game when the CPU becomes the limiting factor, you can see what kind of performance difference to expect between the competing products. As you can see, the R5 1600X came last in every test bar one, and not by a small margin in most of them. At times it was half the speed of the Intel chip, and even in the best case scenario it was around 15% slower. This was seriously slower than we expected, so re-ran every benchmark multiple times, and triple checked our driver and system setup.
There is hope on the horizon though. As AMD works with game makers, it’s starting to see palpable performance increases as devs learn how to use those extra cores. A recent patch to Ashes of the Singularity saw a 31% performance increase, which would put the Ryzen 5 series in serious contention with Intel’s competing quad-core products. However, as it stands, there seems to be something that’s stopping the Ryzen 5’s increased IPC from really showing up in gaming tests. There’s no denying that the Ryzen family in general is a monster when it comes to multi-threaded applications, but there’s still a long way to go when it comes to gaming performance.
As AMD works with game makers, it’s starting to see palpable performance increases