APC_Australia_Issue_442_June_2017

thelab
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LABS BENCHMARK RESULTS
General performance
X265 (FPS)
RYZEN 5 1600X 22.18
INTEL CORE I5-7600K 15.86
0 10 15 20 25 30
Multimedia performance
CINEBENCH R15 SINGLE (INDEX)
RYZEN 5 1600X 159
INTEL CORE I5-7600K 179
0 50 100 150 200 250
CINEBENCH R15 MULTI (INDEX)
RYZEN 5 1600X 1,223
INTEL CORE I5-7600K 663
0 200 400 600 800 1,000
CPU
$359 | WWW.AMD.COM
AMD Ryzen 5 1600X
Taking AMD’s new hexa-core hotness for a spin.
When AMD pulled
the wraps off its
radical new
Ryzen CPU,
it was all about those eight
awesome cores. Count ’em,
Intel. The first Ryzen 7
chips blew the market for
$600-plus CPUs wide open.
But not everybody can
unload that kind of money
on a processor, especially a
brand new design that also
requires a motherboard
upgrade. Enter the Ryzen 5
1600X. On paper, it might
just be the ultimate
balancing act between
performance bang and
efficient deployment of
your hard-earned buck.
The 1600X packs six cores
and supports 12 threads,
while a similarly priced
Intel processor, the Core
i5-7600K, has four cores and
just four threads. And as a
consequence of being the
top six-core model, it also
clocks in at 3.6GHz nominal
and 4.0GHz turbo. It looks
like a very nicely balanced
chip. And for $359, it’s the
mid-range CPU that we’ve
all been waiting for, right?
For the most part, yes.
When it comes to outright
multithreaded performance,
it pops a cap in the head of
the Intel Core i5. The Core
i5-7600K manages 663 in
Cinebench. 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,
AMD still chalks up some
decent wins. It crunches
high-quality video encoding
at 22fps to the i5’s 16fps,
and it motors through the
Fry Render benchmark in
just 3 minutes and 46
seconds — two minutes
faster than the 7600K.
If you want a CPU for
content creation or any
workload that majors on
parallelism, this isn’t 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 is a little
less compelling is in the
games arena. When it comes
to average frame rates, the
1600X delivers on that 4GHz
promise. The subjective
experience, however, tells a
slightly different story.
Total War: Attila is a great
case study. Running on the
Intel processor, it’s supersmooth,
whether you’re up
in the sky, lording it over
your troops, or down in the
thick of the action. But with
the Ryzen CPU at the same
settings and using the same
video card, there’s juddering
almost everywhere.
There are a few reasons
why. We used an Nvidia GPU,
and there are at least
indications that the Nvidia
driver is poorly optimised
for Ryzens. There are also
question marks surrounding
Ryzen’s basic architecture,
which is composed of a pair
of quad-core modules.
Some latency is involved in
communicating between the
two quad-core 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 OK without
any modifications.
On a final note, like other
Ryzen processors, the 1600X
has pretty much zero
overclocking headroom.
AMD has these things
running pretty ragged.
An additional 100MHz was
the best we could achieve.
Jeremy Laird
Verdict
Features
Performance
Value
The six-core design makes this an
appealing choice in some circumstances,
but this is not for gamers (yet).
22 www.apcmag.com