AMD Ryzen 5 1600X.
Taking AMD’s new hexa-core hotness for a spin Jeremy Laird is surprised to find his socks being blown off…
For when four cores aren’t enough and eight just seems like overkill, the Ryzen 5 has six cores and 12 mighty threads that appear to kill the competition dead.
Try this for a compelling proposition. The 1600X packs six cores, and supports 12 software threads, while a similarly priced Intel processor, the Core i5-7600K, has four cores and just four poxy threads. And as a consequence of being the top six-core model, it also clocks in at 3.6GHz nominal and 4.0GHz turbo. In other words, it looks like a very nicely balanced chip – and all for £249. It’s the mid-range CPU that we’ve all been waiting for, right?
For the most part, that’s an affirmative. When it comes to outright multithreaded performance, it pops a cap in the head of the Intel Core i5. Take Cinebench: the Core i5-7600K manages 663 points. And the Ryzen 1600X? A massive 1,223 points – nearly double the Core i5’s capability.
Admittedly, the Core i5 retains some dignity in the single-threaded version of Cinebench, with 179 points compared to the 1600X’s 159 points. However, the AMD chip looks like the better trade-off at first glance. Elsewhere, if the results aren’t quite so spectacular, then AMD still chalks up some decent wins. It crunches high-quality video encoding at 22fps to the i5’s 16fps, and it motors through our rendering benchmark in just three minutes and 46 seconds. That’s a good two minutes faster than the 7600K.
Parallel lines
Put simply, if you want a CPU for content creation, or really any workload that majors on parallelism, this isn’t even a race. The Intel competition is hideously, hopelessly outclassed. That’s true even taking into account the fact that the Ryzen CPU is a little more power-hungry. An extra 10 watts at the wall is surely worth it.
Where the Ryzen proposition is a little less compelling is in the games arena. It looks competitive: when it comes to average frame rates, the 1600X delivers on that 4GHz promise. The subjective experience, however, tells a slightly different story. TotalWar: Attila is a great case study here. Running on the Intel processor, it’s super-smooth, but with the Ryzen CPU at the same settings and using the same video card, there’s noticeable judder almost everywhere.
As for the reasons why? Well, there are numerous candidates. For starters, we used an Nvidia GPU, and there are at least indications that the Nvidia driver is poorly optimised for the Ryzen architecture. There are also question marks surrounding Ryzen’s basic architecture, which comprises a pair of quad-core modules. To cut a long story short, some latency is involved in communicating between the two quadcore modules, and that can require careful management by both OS and application to avoid performance penalties. Ryzen is brand new, so most software has yet to be tweaked to take account of such issues.
Of course, most software runs fine without any modifications. It’s just a pity that the main class of application which seems to be particularly sensitive to Ryzen’s architectural nuances happens to be gaming. But with little overclocking room, all signs point to the standard AMD Ryzen 5 1600 being better value than this X model.