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 System Tests
Our first set of tests is our general system tests. These set of tests are meant to emulate more about what people usually do on a system, like opening large files or processing small stacks of data. This is a bit different to our office testing, which uses more industry standard benchmarks, and a few of the benchmarks here are relatively new and different.
PDF Opening
First up is a self-penned test using a monstrous PDF we once received in advance of attending an event. While the PDF was only a single page, it had so many high-quality layers embedded it was taking north of 15 seconds to open and to gain control on the mid-range notebook I was using at the time. This put it as a great candidate for our 'let's open an obnoxious PDF' test. Here we use Adobe Reader DC, and disable all the update functionality within. The benchmark sets the screen to 1080p, opens the PDF to in fit-to-screen mode, and measures the time from sending the command to open the PDF until it is fully displayed and the user can take control of the software again. The test is repeated ten times, and the average time taken. Results are in milliseconds.
Opening PDFs using Adobe is significantly single threaded, hence why Intel takes the win here for the most part - the 7400 is slightly lower on frequency, enough for the 4.0 GHz Ryzen parts to push ahead.
FCAT Processing
One of the more interesting workloads that has crossed our desks in recent quarters is FCAT - the tool we use to measure stuttering in gaming due to dropped or runt frames. The FCAT process requires enabling a color-based overlay onto a game, recording the gameplay, and then parsing the video file through the analysis software. The software is mostly single-threaded, however because the video is basically in a raw format, the file size is large and requires moving a lot of data around. For our test, we take a 90-second clip of the Rise of the Tomb Raider benchmark running on a GTX 980 Ti at 1440p, which comes in around 21 GB, and measure the time it takes to process through the visual analysis tool.
Similarly, FCAT is single threaded as it analyzes frame-by-frame. The extra frequency helps Intel here.
3D Particle Movement v2.1
This is the latest version of the self-penned 3DPM benchmark. The goal of 3DPM is to simulate semi-optimized scientific algorithms taken directly from my doctorate thesis. Version 2.1 improves over 2.0 by passing the main particle structs by reference rather than by value, and decreasing the amount of double->float->double recasts the compiler was adding in. It affords a ~25% speed-up over v2.0, which means new data.
DigiCortex 1.20
Despite being a couple of years old, the DigiCortex software is a pet project for the visualization of neuron and synapse activity in the brain. The software comes with a variety of benchmark modes, and we take the small benchmark which runs a 32k neuron/1.8B synapse simulation. The results on the output are given as a fraction of whether the system can simulate in real-time, so anything above a value of one is suitable for real-time work. The benchmark offers a 'no firing synapse' mode, which in essence detects DRAM and bus speed, however we take the firing mode which adds CPU work with every firing.
Agisoft Photoscan 1.0
Photoscan stays in our benchmark suite from the previous version, however now we are running on Windows 10 so features such as Speed Shift on the latest processors come into play. The concept of Photoscan is translating many 2D images into a 3D model - so the more detailed the images, and the more you have, the better the model. The algorithm has four stages, some single threaded and some multi-threaded, along with some cache/memory dependency in there as well. For some of the more variable threaded workload, features such as Speed Shift and XFR will be able to take advantage of CPU stalls or downtime, giving sizeable speedups on newer microarchitectures.
Because parts of Photoscan are very multithreaded, such as the first stage, there's plenty of scope for the Ryzen CPUs to pull ahead here.
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happy medium - Tuesday, April 11, 2017 - link
this review could not have purposely made the Ryzen cpu's look any better.This site is ruined.
Drumsticks - Tuesday, April 11, 2017 - link
Care to elaborate?mmegibb - Tuesday, April 11, 2017 - link
This review is consistent with what I saw with the Ryzen 7 reviews on multiple sites. In multi-threaded tests, Ryzen beats Intel because, well, it has more threads. Single thread performance lags Intel. It's up to the user to figure out price/performance for their particular needs.I'm with Drumsticks, please elaborate. This kind of drive-by comment does nothing to advance the conversation.
Anandtech's suite of benchmarks is one of the best.
fanofanand - Tuesday, April 11, 2017 - link
Not only is Anandtech's benchmark suite the best, Ian is the best CPU reviewer in the business, and quite probably in the world. I would love to know what reviewer out there has a better understanding of uArches and has the experience of a professional overclocker who pushed every component to the limits. Ian's experience and background is ideal to review CPUs, and after having read the entire thing I didn't detect even a whiff of bias. Claims of bias towards AMD at Anandtech, that's a new one to me!ddriver - Tuesday, April 11, 2017 - link
Well, the JS benchmarks are pointless really.There is much to be demanded from the benches.
Too much emphasis put on games, do really 50% of the people use computers primarily for games?
Too little on practical tests, number crunching tests are with software barely anyone uses.
People need to see performance in premiere, after effects, cubase, pro tools, vray and similar.
Bias towards AMD however is hilarious, it is quite the opposite actually.
th3ron - Tuesday, April 11, 2017 - link
You seem to forget this is a review of $250 budget cpu's. No one's going to be running pro apps like the ones you listed on cpu's like these. The number crunching test are there for comparison with the more expensive cpu's. I don't think anyones ever bought a cpu based on its Winrar score.A lot of people will uses these cpu's for gaming so lots of gaming benchmarks make sense.
ddriver - Tuesday, April 11, 2017 - link
People who use winrar most likely do not make logical considerations, because if they did, they wouldn't be using garbage like winrar.It is not a budget product, it is mid-range. And it is perfectly capable of doing a good job in content creation and such at a great value. Most of the software used in this review can barely make use of 4 threads, making such tests 66.66% pointless. Most of the tests that can actually scale to utilize the chip are software barely anyone uses or isn't even practically useful to begin with. And contrary to your beliefs, that doesn't accurately translate into performance in software that people actually use.
wolfemane - Wednesday, April 12, 2017 - link
Get off your high horse. People with midrange CPUs aren't going to use pro software? Are you really serious? I know far more people on i5s and Older AMD CPU's who use premier and after effects. My wife and I use the Adobe suite regularly. Both our systems are running 2500k's. She is photographer and has been using mid-range components for just as long. I've been using premier, after effects, and Adobe media encoder longer than she's been using Photoshop. Adobe makes it pretty cheap to use their software. When they went to a monthly rate for their entire suite with free cloud based storage for $25 a month (I think it's a bit more expensive now) we jumped on it. The cloud storage alone is worth twice that.There's no way in hell I'd drop $500+ just on a processor and Intel has made it impossible for mid to low budget builders to afford 6+ cores. But with a pretty quick 6c/12t CPU, I'll be going with AMD for our next range of CPUs, which is coming soon. Sandy bridge is getting old. Just waiting for AM4 mITX.
calken99 - Wednesday, April 12, 2017 - link
Are you really telling me that the 70,000 i5 computers in the business that I work don't use any pro applications? That's just one small corporation. Businesses will dwarf the annual sales of CPUs in comparison to the domestic market.Meteor2 - Sunday, April 16, 2017 - link
I was trying to get some numbers on this. I think consumer computers outnumber corporate by a good two to one. Not sure the average age is that different either -- most places I've seen have been holding on to their PCs for years. Core 2s abound!