Wraith Spire Cooler With Ryzen 5 1500x Review
AMD's initial launch of its all-new "Zen" processor architecture and Ryzen chip platform—with its loftier-end Ryzen vii chips—was a tad bumpy, though positive overall. The AMD Ryzen 7 1800X and 1700X can, in a full general computing sense, have on Intel chips that cost twice every bit much or more than, such every bit the Core i7-6950X Extreme Edition.
Pair ane of these new fries with a insufficiently depression-price motherboard (starting equally low equally $69, when we wrote this in mid-April 2017), and AMD'southward Ryzen seven can be quite the bargain for performance-hungry users on a budget. The major contraction, though, lies in 1080p gaming performance.
When we tested the Ryzen vii fries at resolutions above 1080p when paired with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 graphics menu, performance was finer identical to a PC with the same card and a high-end Intel CPU. But stepping downward to 1080p (where the vast majority of us still game), the high-end Intel chips delivered much higher frame rates, tacking on an actress 20 to 40 frames per second (fps) compared to the Ryzen 7 chips. That's a huge drop in gaming performance for the AMD CPUs, although the AMD fries were withal able to evangelize smooth performance, averaging well above 60fps in our testing at 1080p.
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AMD promised gaming improvements, as driver updates and game patches arrived. And indeed, that seems to be happening, to a certain extent. A recent update to the game Ashes of the Singularity promises significant performance gains at 1080p, and a new AMD-specific power plan for Windows ten (which we used in our benchmark testing) gives the chip hardware more control over how quickly it tin can ramp upward and down, and when it parks CPU cores that aren't currently existence used. AMD says this should translate to better performance in Total War: Warhammer, Gears of State of war 4, Battlefield 4, and a few other games.
In the midst of these promising (though far from all-embracing) changes for the Ryzen platform, lands AMD's midrange CPU lineup. Information technology's based on the same architecture as Ryzen vii.
These Ryzen five chips are more varied in their core count than the Ryzen 7 options (which are all eight cores and 16 threads). And there are more than of them. AMD has four Ryzen 5 chips on offer, starting with the iv-core, eight thread Ryzen 5 1400 and ramping up to the 6-core, 12-thread Ryzen 5 1600X. Pricing is, as nosotros'd expect, more modest for these midrange fries, every bit well, with the Ryzen 5 1400 selling for $169 and the Ryzen 5 1600X topping out the Ryzen 5 line at $249.
Today, we're specifically looking at the scrap one step up from the Ryzen 5 1400, the Ryzen 5 1500X. It'southward too a four-core, eight-thread CPU, with a variable clock speed between 3.5GHz and 3.7GHz, and the ability go even higher if yous pair information technology with a very capable cooler. (More on that later.) The Ryzen five 1500X will sell for $189, which puts it right in the middle, in terms of cost, between the Intel Core i3-7350K (a dual-core, four-thread chip that sells for about $170) and the Cadre i5-6600K (a 4-core, four-thread chip that sells for effectually $220).
So, then, how does the Ryzen five 1500X stack upwards against Intel'south offerings, and has AMD made headway with the 1080p gaming-performance problems nosotros beginning saw with the Ryzen vii chips? To detect that out, we're going to take to dig deep, and of class put the chips through our suite of performance benchmarks. Follow us beneath equally nosotros do just that.
Chip Lineup Details: Ryzen seven, Ryzen 5 & Ryzen iii
From a calculating-performance perspective, AMD's Ryzen vii processors are quite impressive for CPUs priced between $329 and $499. But of course, not everyone tin afford to spend that much on a processor—fifty-fifty if it's arguably a steal compared to Intel'southward pricing. And money bated, unless you are a content creator, transcode video constantly, or run CPU-intensive enquiry tasks, you won't often make use of the eight cores and 16 threads broiled into the Ryzen 7 parts, anyway. For power users with lesser demands (and tighter budgets), AMD is offering up iv Ryzen five processors, starting today, with fewer cores and lower prices.
The Ryzen 5 lineup consists of two six-core and two 4-core Ryzen 5 chips. Lower-terminate Ryzen 3 offerings are coming, says AMD, in the second half of 2017.
A couple of features on all of these chips set them apart from Intel'southward competing offerings. For one: AMD says all the Ryzen fries volition exist unlocked for overclocking. And, at least from the details we have about the Ryzen vii and Ryzen 5 chips appear and then far, all those fries will feature thread-doubling simultaneous multi-threading (SMT). SMT is similar to the Hyper-Threading engineering featured in nearly (but not all) of Intel's mid-to-high-end Cadre processors. Notably, the unlocked Intel Core i5-7600K and previous-generation Core i5-6600K lack Hyper-Threading, leaving them stuck at 4 processing threads, while AMD'southward Ryzen 5 1600 and 1600X chips will have 12 available processing threads, and the Ryzen 5 1500X we're looking at hither has eight.
AMD sent forth a review sample of the acme-end $249 Ryzen 5 1600X, along with the Ryzen 5 1500X, so you tin look a review of that higher-cease scrap shortly after this one. In the concurrently, we tested the two chips alongside each other, so you'll exist able to get a sense of how both perform when nosotros get to our benchmarks subsequently on.
AMD says the Ryzen v 1500X has a 65-watt TDP (thermal design power, a measurement of rut dissipation requirements), which is significantly less than the 95-watt rating of the college-stop Ryzen 7 chips. The Ryzen 5 1500X has one-half the physical cores, then that's not exactly surprising, though it will make this Ryzen v chip easier to absurd in compact cases.
The Ryzen five 1500X has a base clock speed of 3.5GHz, and the power to ramp up to three.7GHz. It can technically ramp upward to 3.9GHz under certain weather condition with a reasonably powerful cooler, cheers to its XFR feature (more on XFR later on). AMD sent along this chip'due south stock Wraith Spire cooler, which we used for almost of our testing. Interestingly, it'south rated to 95 watts of cooling, just as we'll see later in our benchmarks, if you want the best operation possible, particularly for overclocking, y'all will desire to invest in something more than powerful, like a cocky-contained liquid libation or a larger air cooler. The Wraith Spire worked fine at stock speed tests, merely it wasn't much aid getting above the stock clock settings.
The New AMD Chipsets: X370, B350 & More
While the AMD Ryzen five 1500X doesn't have the same giant cost advantage over Intel as the Ryzen 7 1800X does, it makes up for that somewhat when you consider the platform as a whole. The motherboards that AMD's partners rolled out around Ryzen and soon later on sweeten the deal.
Desire a Ryzen-based lath that lets you overclock and install a single high-end graphics card like the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti or i of AMD'southward upcoming "Vega" cards? That will set you back as little as $69, say, for the ASRock AB350M-HDV. The higher-end X370 boards are meliorate equipped to handle high-end builds, and support dual-carte du jour Nvidia configurations in SLI. Simply some B350 boards have two graphics-card slots and support dual-AMD-carte setups via CrossFire.
That's the instance with the Gigabyte AB350-Gaming 3 that nosotros used for testing. It sells for between $99 and $109, and it is no low-end, feature-barren lath. It sports RGB lighting, metallic-wrapped graphics-carte du jour slots, and an Thousand.2 slot for super-fast solid-country drives like the Samsung SSD 960 EVO. You tin certainly spend more; some initial AM4 boards are priced as loftier as $300. Just we've seen several solid-looking options in the $100 range. You can certainly notice good Intel-based options in this toll range, besides. But if you intendance about features like RGB lighting and metal-wrapped slots (and we're certainly not implying that everyone does), you'll more often than not take to pay a little more for an Intel-based board with comparable features.
Technically, five new chipsets are on offering with AMD's new motherboards. Here's a look at their primary features and how they differ, in a summary direct from AMD.
As noted earlier, if you want to install multiple Nvidia graphics cards, y'all'll need to opt for the top-end X370 chipset, but even those boards start just at around $150. The A320 chipset and the A300 don't support overclocking, and the latter lacks native support for USB three.1 Gen ii. But those boards, when they get in, will probable be even more price-aggressive, because they're a footstep downward from the B350 boards, which start as low equally $69.
These lower-cease boards were just trickling out when nosotros wrote this, so we'll have look to run across where they land in terms of features and pricing. But we would non be surprised to see some of these boards priced as low as $50. At present, we're not suggesting you opt for the everyman-cost board you can detect, but the idea of dropping a $189 eight-thread CPU into a sub-$100 motherboard and getting similar (and in some tests better) performance to what you lot'd go with a roughly $400 Intel CPU/motherboard combination is highly-seasoned.
How is AMD able to get its lath partners to produce such comparatively inexpensive motherboards? Primarily, it's considering AMD's Ryzen chips (and its upcoming "Raven Ridge" CPU/GPU fries, or APUs, which volition use the aforementioned AM4 socket) integrate much of the electronics required for interfaces such equally USB, SATA, and PCI Express into the chips themselves. As a result, far fewer electronics demand to exist built onto the boards themselves.
Not everything here works in AMD's favor. These chipsets tend to have fewer PCI Limited lanes and SATA ports than many enthusiast motherboard/CPU combos from Intel. The acme-terminate AMD X370 chipset natively supports six SATA III ports and 16 lanes of PCI Express Gen 2 for speedy SSDs (on top of the 24 lanes of PCIe on the Ryzen chips themselves). Intel's X99 platform, in dissimilarity, supports 10 SATA III ports and up to 40 PCI Limited lanes hanging off the CPU. (The inferior Broadwell-E chip, the Core i7-6800K, has "just" 28 lanes.) So, for those planning on shoving piles of drives and other hardware within their systems, Intel'southward pricier platform will still hold plenty of appeal. But for the vast majority of users looking to drop in a CPU, ane or ii graphics cards, and a bulldoze or three, AMD's offer should more than than suffice—usually at a lower price point than comparable Intel-based boards.
Another area of business organisation in the weeks after the initial Ryzen launch was motherboard availability. For several days, very few AM4 motherboards were in stock on Newegg and other online outlets, sometimes dwindling down to just a few in-stock options. That situation seemed to be improving equally we wrote this in mid-Apr 2017. And so, Newegg showed 11 motherboards in stock, although five others were still listed as "Automobile-Notify," indicating Newegg wasn't sure when those models would again be bachelor. And fifty-fifty if all of those boards were in stock, 33 models is still a far cry from the "more than 80" motherboards AMD'due south CEO and president, Lisa Hsu, promised would launch with Ryzen. There are notwithstanding far more motherboard options available on the Intel side of the silicon fence.
The Compages Basics
As noted earlier, the Ryzen chips represent an entirely new architecture for AMD. Gone are the paired modules of cores sharing an L2 cache that was a hallmark of the FX processor line. Ryzen's cores are more than contained, and they also innovate the thread-doubling SMT we mentioned before. SMT is similar to Intel's Hyper-Threading, which allows demanding software that'southward written to take advantage of it to tackle two computing threads on each core.
CPU-architecture details can get extremely technical as soon as yous look any deeper than the the surface. But to requite you a sense of how AMD has achieved its performance gains with its new Zen compages, the company says it has incorporated an instruction-scheduler window that's one.75 times larger, with a 1.5 times greater result width, that enables AMD to send more than work to the chip's execution units.
Here's a await at the Ryzen dice layout, once more direct from AMD...
Also, a new co-operative-prediction unit, which the company calls "neural-network-based," helps the chips be smarter about preparing and optimizing instructions and paths for tasks that the chip volition demand to tackle in the immediate future.
This all sounds good, to the extent that information technology tin can exist parsed and appreciated without a computer engineering degree. But power efficiency is another surface area in which AMD's FX fries have lagged behind Intel for years. The company'south FX-8370 chip has a TDP of 125 watts, while Intel's (very roughly comparable) Core i7-6700K has a TDP of 91 watts. And Intel's chip includes integrated graphics, while the AMD FX chips (as well as the Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 5 models) lack that feature, requiring an external graphics bill of fare to plug in to a monitor.
On the surface, at to the lowest degree, it seems AMD has fabricated upwards that footing, and then some. The four-cadre, eight-thread Ryzen v 1500X has a TDP rating of 65 watts, and the Ryzen v 1600X (with six cores and 12 threads) is rated at 95 watts. Intel's competing Core i5-6600K (with iv cores and iv threads), meanwhile, is rated at 91 watts, while the Core i3-7350K (ii cores and four threads) has a TDP of 60 watts. At the very least, AMD is closer to Intel in terms of power efficiency every bit it has been in years.
How does AMD achieve its efficiency gains with Ryzen? For starters, these chips are built on a 14nm manufacturing process, the same as fries like the Core i7-6900K, and a big, large leap over the 32nm procedure used for AMD's previous-generation FX chips. And AMD says this 14nm process has already been "density optimized" past the visitor's manufacturing partner, Global Foundries.
Other efficiency-focused features include a "micro-op" cache that keeps of import instructions and information close to the cores, rather than having to attain out to comparatively far-off L2 or L3 caches; and ambitious clock gating, and then there's less wasted power in areas of the cores that aren't beingness used. Here's a visual look at how AMD aims to keep power depict downwardly.
Improve Clocks With Better Coolers: XFR
You may accept noticed that the entry-level Ryzen 5 chip, the Ryzen five 1400, lacks an "X" at the end of its name, every bit does the Ryzen 5 1600, unlike the Ryzen 5 1500X and 1600X. This X indicates the inclusion of a characteristic AMD is calling Extended Frequency Range (XFR).
XFR makes use of what the company is calling "SenseMI," sensors and algorithms that, among other things, measure voltage, power, and temperature in fine detail, a thousand times per second. The sensors monitor where the chip is situated within its power and heat envelopes, besides as where it expects to be in the virtually term.
When it comes to clock speeds, SenseMI allows the chip to "sense" when it has sufficient cooling and, assuming y'all take an XFR-enabled model (again: one of those CPUs that end in "X"), to clock even college than the top heave-clock speed. The thought, at to the lowest degree in function, is to reward buyers or builders who invest in big air coolers or liquid cooling to relish some operation gains.
Now, that sure sounds good. Merely, at least with the first round of Ryzen 7 chips, the XFR boost is locked at just an extra 100MHz. That gets a bit better with the Ryzen 5 1500X; it's able to bound up an extra 200MHz with XFR, taking it from a top 3.7GHz to 3.9GHz if at that place'southward lots of cooling potential available.
Nosotros said when we reviewed the Ryzen 7 1800X that we hoped that futurity Ryzen chips would let for a bigger XFR boost, because the above seems like a long way to go, both in terms of underlying applied science and the extra toll of a better libation, to gain just an extra 100MHz. That's certainly improved here. Just going out of your way for XFR with this chip just really makes sense if you already accept an existing cooler that works with the new AM4 mounting machinery. Many cooler manufacturers are offering adapter kits for a minor price, or fifty-fifty free, though you'll have to postal service away for them.
But we don't recommend buying a new, expensive cooler for the 1500X, because while you might get slightly better performance by doing so and placing it on this chip, that money would be ameliorate spent by stepping up to one of the college-finish Ryzen 5 fries. The Ryzen v 1600 costs just $40 more than, and it nets you two more than physical cores and 4 more computing threads.
Two things to note about the Ryzen 7 chips every bit a whole: These are CPUs only, with no onboard graphics, in the same mold equally Intel's CPU-only East-Series fries. You'll need to utilise them with a discrete video card. And the underside will look familiar to the AMD faithful...
The Ryzen chips nevertheless use pins on the CPU itself, not the socket-side pins and on-chip contacts that Intel has long since moved to.
Functioning Testing
For our exam setup, we dropped the Ryzen five 1500X into the Gigabyte AB350-Gaming 3 motherboard we mentioned before on, along with 16GB of Geil EVO X DDR4 memory running at iii,200MHz. An AMD Radeon RX 480 video card handled display output for our CPU-specific tests, and a OCZ Vector 150 was the SATA-interface boot drive. Nosotros could have used a faster PCI Express/NVMe drive, but as we tested previous chips from Intel and AMD using SATA SSDs, we didn't want to drib in a speed demon and give the Ryzen 5 1500X an unfair advantage. SATA SSDs are however very respectable.
Cinebench R15
First up in our testing regimen: Maxon'south CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to make utilise of all available processor cores and threads, using the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image. The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC'due south suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Along with the usual test that makes use of all available cores, we've added the single-cadre results here to go a sense of how AMD's new chip fares in lightly threaded workloads.
Single-core performance was a sticking point of AMD's previous-generation chips, which you tin can meet by taking a look back at the AMD FX-8370 review. Merely AMD'due south new Ryzen five 1500X scrap, while it couldn't lucifer the much college-clocked (four.2GHz to 4.5GHz) and virtually twice as pricey Core i7-7700K, was at least competitive with everything else here on the unmarried-cadre test.
But using all four of its cores and 8 threads, the Ryzen 5 1500X outpaced the Cadre i5-6600K by 33 percent, and nearly doubled the score of the 4-thread Core i3-7350K. Equally you lot can meet from the results of the higher-cease Ryzen chips, though, if you frequently tackle tasks that accept advantage of all available cores, the half dozen- or eight-core Ryzen 5 or Ryzen 7 fries are worth spending more than for.
iTunes 10.6 Conversion Test
We then switched over to our venerable iTunes Conversion Exam, using version 10.half dozen of iTunes. This test taxes only a unmarried CPU core, as much legacy software still does.
Music encoding doesn't exactly push button a mod CPU to its limits, and certainly not i like this. Just this exam still illustrates that, for programs that are older or haven't been written to take advantage of multiple cores, the Core i7-7700K is still male monarch, thanks to its college clock speed and Intel'due south newest compages. And the Core i3-7350K isn't far behind, either.
That said, the AMD chips hither weren't that far off the showing of the Core i5-6600K. We'd still like to meet the AMD chip do better here, especially given that the Core i3-7350K is speedier at a lower cost of about $170. While single- or lightly-threaded tasks are all the same a sticking indicate for AMD compared to Intel's latest Kaby Lake architecture, we're still marking downwardly AMD's showing here every bit "practiced enough." Most demanding software that tin can take skillful reward of lots of cores and threads has been updated to apply two or more than, at this indicate.
Handbrake 0.nine.9
These days, our traditional Handbrake test (run under version 0.9.8) takes less than a minute to complete with high-stop chips like these. (It involves the rendering of a five-minute video, Pixar'due south Dug's Special Mission, to an iPhone-friendly format.) So, we've switched to a much more taxing (and fourth dimension-consuming) video-crunching exam that uses a nice, big hunk of 4K video.
In this test, we switched to the newer Handbrake version 0.ix.9, and tasked the CPUs to catechumen a 12-minute-and-14-2nd 4K .MOV file (the 4K showcase brusque moving picture Tears of Steel) into a 1080p MPEG-4 video…
If the previous test left united states of america wishing for a flake more operation from AMD's new chips, this result left us impressed by what the company was able to evangelize.
Not only did the Ryzen v 1500X shave more than three minutes off the time of the more than expensive Intel Core i5 chip, simply the $249 Ryzen v 1600X was well ahead of the $350 Core i7-7700K, equally well.
POV-Ray three.7
Next upward, using the "All CPUs" setting, we ran the POV-Ray criterion, which challenges all available cores to return a circuitous photo-realistic image using ray tracing. After that, over again to become a sense of how AMD's new scrap handles unmarried-core performance, we ran the same criterion using the "One CPU" setting.
Over again, the Ryzen v 1500X looked practiced compared to the Cadre i5-6600K hither on the All CPU setting, and information technology positively trounced the Core i3-7350K. Merely shifting to the Ane CPU setting, information technology landed in last identify, a little over a infinitesimal behind the Core i5-6600K.
Blender 2.77a
Blender is an open-source 3D content-cosmos plan that can exist used to pattern and create visual effects, animation, and 3D models for utilise in video games or 3D printing. We open a standard test file (information technology'due south of a flying squirrel) and time how long the test processor takes to end the render.
The results hither were all pretty close, with only a few seconds separating near of the chips, other than the dual-cadre Core i3-7350K. That'southward interesting, considering the Core i5-6600K has half the threads of the Ryzen 5 1500X (which was only a second faster than the Core i5 here).
While AMD'due south Ryzen 5 1500X didn't expect its all-time here, it still landed merely ix seconds behind the showing of the $350 Core i7-7700K. It was besides well ahead of the Core i3 processor, which has half the cores and threads.
seven-Cypher sixteen.04 Benchmark
Final, nosotros fired up the popular seven-Zilch file-pinch software and ran its built-in compression/decompression benchmark, which is another useful test of a CPU's multi-cadre abilities.
This test, which seems to take full advantage of all bachelor cores and threads, makes the AMD chips as a whole look good. The Ryzen 5 1500X in particular stomps the pricier Core i5-6600K hither by over 60 percent. And while it trails the Core i7-7700K, the Ryzen 5 1500X is behind that chip by only nearly 23 percent, despite the fact that it costs simply a little more than than half the Core i7'due south cost.
Overclocking
Overclocking the Ryzen 5 1500X was an interesting endeavor.
Offset, nosotros tried cranking up the core clocks and inching up the voltage with the stock Wraith Spire cooler that AMD sent with the CPU. Despite the cooler'south 95-watt TDP rating and the 65-watt rating of the chip itself, we didn't run across stellar results. The highest stable clock speed we could achieve was three.85GHz. Even then, the few benchmarks we ran either turned in lower-than-stock results, or a very slight increase. For instance, the all-time score nosotros could achieve when overclocked in Cinebench R15 was 815, well-nigh a one.v percent increase over the score we achieved at stock settings (803).
Given we more often than not saw lower scores when cranking up the clock speeds, indicating the CPU was throttling (temperatures were likewise creeping up well above 60 degrees C after just a couple of minutes of CPU load), we decided to remove the Ryzen 5 flake and dropped information technology in our Ryzen 7 testbed. That testbed includes a 240mm self-contained cooler (shown in the image above), an EK Waterblocks (EKWB) model that AMD sent u.s.a. for our testing. With that libation affixed to the CPU, and running in a higher-end Aorus AX370-Gaming v motherboard, we were able to get the Ryzen 5 1500X stable at 4GHz.
Now, that'southward impressive, just a bit giddy given that the CPU is priced at $189, and the EK Waterblocks libation we used to continue information technology stable costs nearly $250. If yous have that kind of cash in your budget, you lot should opt for a Ryzen vii 1700 with higher clocks and twice the cores, or put that money toward an SSD or video menu. Nosotros'd be interested to meet how the Ryzen 5 1500X performs with a larger budget-friendly air cooler like the $30 Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO. But as existing coolers don't work out of the box with AMD's new platform yet, and we didn't take any adapters for the older coolers nosotros do have, we had to run with the stock Wraith Spire libation AMD sent united states of america with the chip. The large and expensive 240mm cooler produced meliorate results, simply we wouldn't recommend anyone pair such a pricey cooler with a budget-friendly CPU similar the Ryzen v 1500X.
All that said, AMD has fabricated some strides even in the concluding month when it comes to overclock testing. We used a new version of the Ryzen Master overclocking utility that AMD sent us (which the company says volition be available to everyone once the Ryzen v chips launch). This newer version negates the pesky actress steps we endured in Ryzen vii testing, where we had to enable the High Precision Event Timer (HPET.bat) file, washed via the command line, to enable most of the CPU's overclocking features. And we definitely like the fact that you can adjust clock speeds in 25MHz increments, and so you tin can get pretty fine-grained in your tweaking, if that'due south your matter.
Gaming Performance
Nosotros don't ordinarily run graphics tests when testing processors without integrated graphics. That's mostly because graphics operation typically has much (much) more to practice with what graphics card y'all accept installed than what processor you're using—particularly when you're using a adequately powerful chip like the AMD Ryzen 5 1500X or Intel'south competing Core i5-6600K.
But, we know after testing the Ryzen 7 chips that AMD'south new CPUs had issues keeping upward with Intel's recent Core i5s and Cadre i7s at 1080p. Given this, and the fact that AMD seems to have been hard at work over the final month or so to meliorate the problem, nosotros wanted to see if the Ryzen 5 1500X could deliver acceptable frame rates with a high-end video carte. And then nosotros swapped out the AMD Radeon RX 480 that we used for the bulk of our benchmark testing, dropped in an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition card, and ran a few of the tests that we likewise use for graphics-carte testing.
For comparison numbers, nosotros did the same thing with our Intel Kaby Lake testbed running on an Intel Core i7-7700K. Both systems were tested using a Serial ATA-based boot drive and 16GB of RAM. The RAM in our Ryzen five testbed was specifically running at 3,200MHz using the motherboard'due south built-in XMP profile. While we haven't done a ton of game testing with AMD's new fries, indications both from other review sites and AMD itself is that faster RAM speeds have more of an bear on on gaming performance than has typically been the case with Intel's processors for the last few generations. So go along that in mind if you're buying RAM for a Ryzen-based gaming build.
Commencement, we fired upward late 2015'southward Rise of the Tomb Raider in DirectX 11 manner at the Very High preset and ran the built-in benchmark. In curt, we plant that AMD has improved performance, but Intel is still well ahead at 1080p.
Our Ryzen v 1500X-based rig averaged 110fps, 5fps improve than nosotros saw when testing the Ryzen vii 1700. But the Cadre i7-7700K averaged 128fps with the aforementioned GTX 1080 bill of fare. Evidently, knocking 18fps off your gaming performance is never a good thing—particularly because how expensive high-terminate graphics cards are these days. But at to the lowest degree we're seeing a Ryzen five bit delivering better performance than the Ryzen seven fleck we tested non much more a month agone, indicating the company is delivering improvements.
Just as with the Ryzen 7 fries, when nosotros stepped upwardly to 4K resolution (3,840x2,160), performance roughly evened out. At that higher setting, the Ryzen v 1500X arrangement delivered an average frame charge per unit of 48.2fps, which is really slightly higher than the 46.6fps average delivered by our Core i7-equipped test bed. That difference is well within our general two pct margin of fault.
Next, we switched to the game Far Cry Central, on the title'southward Loftier preset, and saw more than promising results for AMD. At 1080p in this championship, the Ryzen 7 1700 system managed an average of only 76fps, compared to the Core i7-7700K's showing of 130fps, a staggering 70 per centum operation edge for Intel. Simply the lesser Ryzen 5 1500X in our B350-based testbed turned in 92fps on the same examination. AMD isn't close to communicable Intel here, but a leap from 76fps to 92fps (a gain of more than 20 percent) is much appreciated, peculiarly when you consider the Ryzen 5 1500X is a lower-stop processor than the Ryzen seven 1700. Jumping up to 4K resolution on Far Cry Primal, however, all the Ryzen chips we've tested thus far delivered the same 49fps, a single frame ahead of the Intel Core i7-7700K machine's 48fps at the same 4K setting with the same Nvidia graphics card.
What do we glean from this?
In short, nosotros still need to meet more gaming improvements at 1080p from AMD's chips, specially for those who ain or may be interested in buying loftier-refresh-charge per unit 1080p monitors that back up rates above 100Hz. But note that, as we mentioned before, AMD has been out of the loftier-end CPU realm for years, and it seems—at least in the limited tests we were able to do before the launch of the Ryzen 5 fries—that the company is making strides to at to the lowest degree lessen the gaming gap between its chips and Intel's at 1080p. Just as games aren't ever optimized for make-new graphics cards as presently every bit they launch (particularly if you happen to have a multi-menu SLI or CrossFire setup), just are patched in the weeks that follow to deliver improve functioning, the aforementioned will likely happen on the CPU side of things—at least to a certain extent. Hopefully what nosotros saw in a higher place, likewise equally the company'south announcements around Warhammer: Total War and Ashes of the Singularity that we mentioned before, are indications that this is already happening.
Plus, allow's not forget: Even if you are gaming on a 1080p screen, the most-triple-digit performance we saw in testing is still very smoothen, and close enough to what Intel delivers that you lot'd demand both a very fast monitor and extremely practiced eyesight to see the departure. Down in the existent world where most of us still game, in the 60fps range, what AMD delivers here is more than "proficient plenty" for serious gaming performance.
Determination
In a general sense, AMD'southward Ryzen chips go on to impress on the raw CPU-performance front—especially when tackling tasks that accept total reward of all CPU cores and threads, like video editing or transcoding. The Ryzen 5 1500X packs in twice the threads of similarly priced Intel chips in this price range (and a fair scrap higher up it).
If you're primarily interested in gaming performance at 1080p, Intel'due south fries are still meliorate suited to that chore, and that probably won't change anytime soon. But the Ryzen 5 1500X makes for a better all-around-performance scrap than the Core i5-6600K or Cadre i3-7350K, cheers to its extra compute threads.
Our i reservation nigh the Ryzen 5 1500X, though, aside from the still-non-neat 1080p gaming performance, derives primarily from Ryzen's strengths in core and thread counts. As nice as it is to accept eight threads compared to the iv threads bachelor from Intel parts, if you ofttimes take advantage of all those threads, you may want to spend a lilliputian more. For $twoscore more than the four-core, eight-thread Ryzen 5 1500X, you can pick up a six-core, 12-thread Ryzen 5 1600. That chip is clocked a little lower (3.2GHz base versus 3.5GHz on the 1500X), just the boost clock speeds of the two chips are just 100MHz autonomously (3.7GHz with the Ryzen v 1500X, iii.6GHz with the Ryzen 5 1600).
That doesn't make the Ryzen 5 1600 a better option for everyone. But if you're ofttimes performing time-consuming CPU-jump tasks that have total advantage of all cores, we think a 50 percentage increase in the number of cores is well worth an extra $40 investment. And at $219, the Ryzen 5 1600 is all the more impressive given that Intel's half dozen-core Cadre i7-6800K costs $359 and requires a more expensive X99-chipset motherboard. If you're looking to maximize functioning on a budget, it'south hard to ignore AMD'due south vi-cadre chips—or the eight-core, 16-thread Ryzen 7 chips, for that matter.
AMD Ryzen v 1500X
The Bottom Line
With twice the compute threads as similarly priced Intel chips and somewhat better 1080p gaming performance, the Ryzen 5 1500X will entreatment strongly to those who game and regularly tackle CPU-intensive tasks. But the Ryzen five 1600 delivers extra cores for just $forty more.
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Source: https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/amd-ryzen-5-1500x
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