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 Rendering Tests
Rendering tests are a long-time favorite of reviewers and benchmarkers, as the code used by rendering packages is usually highly optimized to squeeze every little bit of performance out. Sometimes rendering programs end up being heavily memory dependent as well - when you have that many threads flying about with a ton of data, having low latency memory can be key to everything. Here we take a few of the usual rendering packages under Windows 10, as well as a few new interesting benchmarks.
Corona 1.3
Corona is a standalone package designed to assist software like 3ds Max and Maya with photorealism via ray tracing. It's simple - shoot rays, get pixels. OK, it's more complicated than that, but the benchmark renders a fixed scene six times and offers results in terms of time and rays per second. The official benchmark tables list user submitted results in terms of time, however I feel rays per second is a better metric (in general, scores where higher is better seem to be easier to explain anyway). Corona likes to pile on the threads, so the results end up being very staggered based on thread count.
Blender 2.78
For a render that has been around for what seems like ages, Blender is still a highly popular tool. We managed to wrap up a standard workload into the February 5 nightly build of Blender and measure the time it takes to render the first frame of the scene. Being one of the bigger open source tools out there, it means both AMD and Intel work actively to help improve the codebase, for better or for worse on their own/each other's microarchitecture.
POV-Ray 3.7.1
Another regular benchmark in most suites, POV-Ray is another ray-tracer but has been around for many years. It just so happens that during the run up to AMD's Ryzen launch, the code base started to get active again with developers making changes to the code and pushing out updates. Our version and benchmarking started just before that was happening, but given time we will see where the POV-Ray code ends up and adjust in due course.
Cinebench R15
The latest version of CineBench has also become one of those 'used everywhere' benchmarks, particularly as an indicator of single thread performance. High IPC and high frequency gives performance in ST, whereas having good scaling and many cores is where the MT test wins out.
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msroadkill612 - Thursday, April 13, 2017 - link
I hear the good ryzen air cooler is pretty good, u sure u wanna bother w/ DIY cooling?Ratman6161 - Tuesday, April 18, 2017 - link
OK, so Friday (4/16) I actually picked up a Ryzen 5 1600 and an Asrock AB350 Pro 4 motherboard so I'm now speaking from some actual experience.So far its fully living up to my expectations. Regular office work its very fast and smooth (but for what I'm doing an i3 would be too). Running three VM's at the same time though, as I hoped, its still fast and smooth even with each VM assigned 4 cores and even when some of the the VM's are actually doing something. So from that alone I think I chose well. CPU was full price $219 but the motherboard was only $39 as part of a bundle deal (Microcenter). Throw in 32 GB RAM for $210 and overall it was a cheap upgrade.
Cooling and Overclocking: I'd disagree (partly) with the included cooler being that good. It does a good job of cooling the CPU but its rather loud compared to what I'm used to. I was using a corsair all in one liquid cooling system (H55 with dual custom fans runing at very low speeds) on the old 2600K so I'm used to a near silent system except when the fans really ramped up during extended stability testing. With the included cooler I've only been able to get it stable at 3.7 Ghz. At 3.8 things get weird. But I'm also not turning up the voltage until I have my liquid cooler back. Ordered the Ryzen bracket for it from Corsair and I'm still waiting on it to come in.
But, whatever Overclock I get is just a bonus. Works great for me at stock speeds.
Memory: I got 16x2 Crucial DDR4 2400 DIMMS which are dual sided. No problem getting them to run at their rated 2400 but no luck at 2666. I was able to tighten up the timings a bit from rated 16-16-16 to 15-15-15 without changing any voltages. I know that's not that fast but for my purposes quantity is what counts most.
I'm not a gamer so I can't say anything about that.
However...I do miss the onboard GPU from my old Intel chip. Why? well, I was running three monitors. My old GTS450 PCIe card only supports two but I used to plug the third (and could have done a 4th) into the processor graphics. So now I'm down to only 2 monitors. Suppose i could buy a newer but cheap video card that supports more than 2?
SkipPerk - Wednesday, May 3, 2017 - link
You can get a ton of cheap card options on ebay that have three video outputs. The AMD ones tend to be cheaper, but there are some nVidia as well. I think I had a 7750 once that was single slot and had three outputs. Tons of the dual slot cards have dual DVI and HDMI. I got a deal on a bunch of GTX 650's a while back that had that config and they supported triple monitor setups beautifully. I might be wrong on that model number now that I think about it. In any case, there are always good, cheap video cards on eBay.MrSpadge - Tuesday, April 11, 2017 - link
Ian, there are lot's of graphs in the gaming section. I think that's rather hard to read. You could combine the average FPS and 99th percentile into the same graph. Not sure how to make it look pretty, but since both graphs mostly carry the same mesage that would make it obviously more compact.Icehawk - Tuesday, April 11, 2017 - link
They are way too dense, I skipped all of the gaming pages... and I'm a gamer.milkod2001 - Tuesday, April 11, 2017 - link
Will you be updating results to BENCH? . I'd like to see how 1600x, 1700x and 1800x stack vs my existing Haswell 4770Kzodiacfml - Tuesday, April 11, 2017 - link
Praise you for the RX480 benches there! Finally! Being GPU limited, the advantage of Intel chips are small. Many users might not be able to take advantage of the extra cores but in a few years, it will have its value.th3ron - Tuesday, April 11, 2017 - link
People posted the samething when the 8150 was launched and we know how that turned out.SkipPerk - Wednesday, May 3, 2017 - link
The 8150 was not bad once the price came down. I bought one for $160 years ago, and I still use it on a secondary machine. It is a nice little chip for the money. My only regret is that I ran it at 4.8 ghz for years, and now i need to run it at 3.6 or lower or it gets strange. It was a fine chip compared to the i5 2500.10101010101010 - Tuesday, April 11, 2017 - link
Why not overclock the K? The whole battle is core speed Vs core number so it couldn't be more disingenuous to completely strip the main reason for buying the Intel chip away.