MID-RANGE CPUs AMD Ryzen 5 1400

AMD Ryzen 5 1400 SCORE ✪✪✪✪✪ PRICE £128 (£154 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/275ry14

An overclockable quad-core CPU for £154 sounds too good to be true, but the Ryzen 5 1400 is just that. It offers four physical cores for £19 less than the dual-core Core i3-7350K – and thanks to AMD’s SMT (simultaneous multi-threading) te chnology, it can actually handle eight threads simultaneously, which is twice what you’ll get from a Core i5 chip.

The sacrifices are obvious: there’s only 8MB of L3 cache, and the Ryzen 5 1400 has a base frequency of just 3.2GHz, capable of boosting up to a maximum of 3.45GHz. That relatively slow stock speed didn’t do the Ryzen 5 1400 any favours in our image-editing test, but it regained ground in rendering tests, where its quad-core design raced ahead of the Core i3-7350K.

And things looked up when we tried overclocking the Ryzen 5 1400. Using a vcore of 1.425V, we achieved a stable 4GHz clock speed – slightly faster than we were able to get out of the Ryzen 5 1600. As a result, the cheapest of this month’s chips managed to nudge ahead in our benchmarks. Notably, it was also much quicker in Cinebench than the overclocked Core i5-7600K.

Even so, this chip wasn’t able to keep up with the Ryz en 5 1500X, which has twice the amount of L3 cache. That was especially noticeable in our gaming tests: in Total War: Warhammer the Ryzen 5 1500X proved quicker at stock speed than the overclocked 1400. While the Ryzen 5 1400 is temptingly affordable, we reckon it’s worth shelling out the extra for its X-series sibling.

AMD Ryzen 5 1500X SCORE ✪✪✪✪✪ PRICE £144 (£173 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/275ry15

The quad-core Ryzen 5 1500X costs only £30 less than the six-core Ryzen 5 1600. That might make it look like an iffy proposition: after all, the 1600 delivers 50% more processing power for your buck. However, this is an X-edition CPU, which means it holds advantages elsewhere. In particular, it has a huge 16MB L3 cache – the same as the most expensive Ryzen 7 CPUs. It runs fast too, with a base frequency of 3.5GHz, a Precision Boost clock of 3.7GHz and the highest XFR boost of any Ryzen CPU, at 200MHz. Together, these features make it quicker than the Ryzen 5 1600 at stock speed – as long as the workload doesn’t rely too heavily on multithreading. The 1500X also compares favourably to Intel’s quadcore opposition. The Core i5-7600K costs nearly £60 more, and admittedly at stock spe eds it proved a little faster in our image-editing test. However, we were easily able to overclock the Ryzen 5 1500X to 4GHz, eroding that advantage significantly. And in our multi-threaded tests the AMD chip sailed into the lead – no great surprise, as it can process twice as many simultaneous threads as the Core i5. The real choice is between the 1500X and 1600. For lightly threaded tasks, the 1500X edges out its rival with faster clock speeds, making it a great value chip for everyday desktop computing. For multi-threaded performance, however, the 1600’s extra cores give it a big advantage. If you’re not sure which to go for, the Ryzen 5 1600 is the more versatile, future-proof choice.

AMD Ryzen 5 1600 SCORE ✪✪✪✪✪ PRICE £168 (£203 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/275am16

The Ryzen 5 1600 is the second most powerful CPU in the Ryzen 5 family, behind the 1600X. On paper, the speed gap is quite wide: its 3.2GHz base and 3.6GHz Precision Boost frequencies are 400MHz slower than those of the Ryzen 5 1600X, and XFR only pushes this up to 3.65GHz, compared to the 1600X’s 4.1GHz. Otherwise, though, the two are largely identical, offering six cores (with support for 12 threads) and 16MB of L3 cache.

As you’d expect, the 1600 lagged slightly behind the X-edition CPU in every one of our benchmarks. The 1600’s lowly clock speed also left it behind the Intel CPUs, and AMD’s own 1500X, in our image-editing and game tests. The multithreaded tests, however, allowed the six-core design to show its power, outstripping the Core i5-7600K and Ryzen 5 1500X by sizeable margins.

The thing to remember, of course, is that stock speed isn’t the whole story. Like all Ryzen CPUs, the 1600 can be overclocked: we got its core speed up to 3.9GHz using a vcore of 1.425V, which enabled it to beat an overclocked Core i7-7700K in our encoding test, and in Cinebench.

This also allowed the Ryzen CPU to hold its own against the Intel chips in games. The pricier Core i5 managed to deliver 4% more performance in Total War: Warhammer, but aside from that we saw next to no difference between Intel and AMD chips in other games, including Fallout 4.

In short, the Ryzen 5 1600 is a strong and very affordable general-purpose CPU – as long as you’re up for some overclocking.

“The cheapest of this month’s chips managed to nudge ahead in our benchmarks”