The AMD Ryzen 5 1600X vs Core i5 Review: Twelve Threads vs Four at $250
by Ian Cutress on April 11, 2017 9:00 AM ESTBenchmarking Performance: CPU Office Tests
The office programs we use for benchmarking aren't specific programs per-se, but industry standard tests that hold weight with professionals. The goal of these tests is to use an array of software and techniques that a typical office user might encounter, such as video conferencing, document editing, architectural modelling, and so on and so forth. At present we have two such tools to use.
PCMark8
Despite originally coming out in 2008/2009, Futuremark has maintained PCMark8 to remain relevant in 2017. On the scale of complicated tasks, PCMark focuses more on the low-to-mid range of professional workloads, making it a good indicator for what people consider 'office' work. We run the benchmark from the commandline in 'conventional' mode, meaning C++ over OpenCL, to remove the graphics card from the equation and focus purely on the CPU. PCMark8 offers Home, Work and Creative workloads, with some software tests shared and others unique to each benchmark set.
Chromium Compile (v56)
Our new compilation test uses Windows 10 Pro, VS Community 2015.3 with the Win10 SDK to combile a nightly build of Chromium. We've fixed the test for a build in late March 2017, and we run a fresh full compile in our test. Compilation is the typical example given of a variable threaded workload - some of the compile and linking is linear, whereas other parts are multithreaded.
SYSmark 2014 SE
SYSmark is developed by Bapco, a consortium of industry CPU companies. The goal of SYSmark is to take stripped down versions of popular software, such as Photoshop and Onenote, and measure how long it takes to process certain tasks within that software. The end result is a score for each of the three segments (Office, Media, Data) as well as an overall score. Here a reference system (Core i3-6100, 4GB DDR3, 256GB SSD, Integrated HD 530 graphics) is used to provide a baseline score of 1000 in each test.
A note on contect for these numbers. AMD left Bapco in the last two years, due to differences of opinion on how the benchmarking suites were chosen and AMD believed the tests are angled towards Intel processors and had optimizations to show bigger differences than what AMD felt was present. The following benchmarks are provided as data, but the conflict of opinion between the two companies on the validity of the benchmark is provided as context for the following numbers.
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Meteor2 - Wednesday, April 12, 2017 - link
Benchmarks: I love the new Chromium compilation and straightforward 4K h264->h265 tests. Bravo.Lehti - Wednesday, April 12, 2017 - link
As it is, the Ryzen 5 lineup is a compelling purchase, even for us European who usually get awful deals with PC components. If AMD released it as an APU lineup, however, this would be a no-brainer for everyone. And yes, I know that Ryzen 5 chips are basically binned Ryzen 7s, but still...vladx - Wednesday, April 12, 2017 - link
Can't agree there, I'm from Europe and the 7600k is only around $20 more expensive than the Ryzen 1500x and it beats it in a lot of games and also fares better in office workloads. And that $20 gets at least even out when you put in consideration the Intel B250 motherboards which are $20-40 than competing AMD B350 mainstream offers.Meteor2 - Wednesday, April 12, 2017 - link
Where in Europe are you? In the UK the R5 1500X is $80 cheaper than the the i5-7600K.t.s - Wednesday, April 12, 2017 - link
You're focusing in single threaded apps / games, again, and again, and again. Not everyone use they computer for ST apps / games. And when you factored it in, R5 is very compelling product.vladx - Thursday, April 13, 2017 - link
That's true but enthusiasts and prosumers are maybe 2% of the market, the rest 98% won't use their PC for more than browsing the web, watching movies and basic office work.deltaFx2 - Friday, April 14, 2017 - link
@vladx : That's true but if browsing the web, watching movies, and basic office work is all you do, Excavator is perfectly fine for you. I expect people buying 7700k or R5 or even some i5s have some workloads that justify the expense. This is especially true of Ryzen as the current crop need an external GPU. IIRC Raven Ridge desktop parts come only next year.Sages - Wednesday, April 12, 2017 - link
Would it be possible to do another power review with ryzen like you guys did with Carrizo in 2016? Or do you guys not have the equipment for that? For me as a electrical engineering student that article was very interesting. Keep up the good work!!TheJian - Wednesday, April 12, 2017 - link
"A side note on OS preparation. As we're using Windows 10, there's a large opportunity for something to come in and disrupt our testing. So our default strategy is multiple: disable the ability to update as much as possible, disable Windows Defender, uninstall OneDrive, disable Cortana as much as possible, implement the high performance mode in the power options, and disable the internal platform clock which can drift away from being accurate if the base frequency drifts (and thus the timing ends up inaccurate)."Or you could have just used Win7 since 1/2 the world still uses it and don't plan on quitting it until well after 2020. Until I see someone actually REVIEW these chips with win7, they won't get my money. Vulkan runs on everything, I have no need for dx12 (all everything you guys just mentioned plus all the tracking etc etc). With no apu crap involved here, you should test win7 if only to show if there is any differences. Considering most of the issues are bios fixes it seems (motherboard), no reason to abandon win7 in testing. Again, half of your readers are using it, more than 2x win10, and many of these people are stuck on it because they don't know how to get back to win7...ROFL
I can't wait for everyone to drop dx12 once whatever they're working on currently is done (many too far along to quit right now in a current game build). I think we'll see many more Vulkan/dx11 only announcements later this year. No point in a dev supporting an OS (dx12 I mean) that was given away for a year and still can't hit 1/2 of win7's users, not to mention many woke up an were accidentally "upgraded" to win10 with no ability to get back reliably. Uninstalling it doesn't always work (and many don't own win7 discs to get back in cases like Dell etc for some people) ;)
But hey, keep acting like win7 doesn't exist much to the chagrin of your readers.
vladx - Wednesday, April 12, 2017 - link
"Until I see someone actually REVIEW these chips with win7, they won't get my money."Who are you punishing here, but yourself? You probably shouldn't anyway because neither Ryzen or Kabylake are supported on Win7.