A great alternative to Intel
AMD Ryzen 5 1600X
The goodenough CPU with decent gaming prowess and a very attractive multithreaded performance for the price.
AMD’s Ryzen 7 targeted the high-end, workstation segment of the market with their 8-core/16thread offerings, but it’s the mid-range Ryzen 5 chips that will be of most interest to mainstream consumers.
The Ryzen 5 1600X sits on top of the Ryzen 5 stack, boasting an impressive 6-core/12-thread design. The closest Intel alternative – the Intel Core i5-7600K – only has 4-cores/4-threads, even if it does have a higher turbo frequency of 4.2GHz.
So while Intel wins in terms of single-core performance, the 1600X absolutely tears it apart when it comes to heavily threaded workloads. Similar to what we saw with Ryzen 7, AMD has a strong advantage in multi-threaded performance in the Ryzen 5. Furthermore, it doesn’t hurt that 12 threads was previously unheard of at this price point, and if you’re going to be dealing with CPUheavy tasks, it’s difficult to say no to the 1600X.
In fact, there’s a lot to like about it. For starters, it shares similar clock speeds as the Ryzen 7 1800X, with a 3.6GHz base clockand4.1GHz boost clock with XFR. Yet, it is less than half the price of the latter; you only trade off two cores for a small performance penalty.
It also supports all of Ry zen’ s signature SenseMIfeatures, suchasPure Power and Precision Boost.
While the Ryzen 7 1800X was 31 per cent quicker than the Ryzen 5 1600X in Cinebench R15, the performance differential between the two in games was almost negligible. To put in perspective, the 1600X was a good 28 per cent faster than the 4-core/8thread Intel Core i7-7700K in the same Cinebench test, a CPU that costs nearly $200 more.
However, as today’s games favor high singlecore clock speeds, Intel is overall still the better option if you want all out gaming performance.
That said, Ryzen isn’t as bad at gaming as the headlines make it out to be. It isn’tthefastest, butsometimes “good enough”, is enough for most folks. The 1600X makes up for it with major advantages in highly-threaded work and competitive pricing.