The AMD Ryzen 5 2500X and Ryzen 3 2300X CPU Review
by Ian Cutress on February 11, 2019 11:45 AM ESTGaming: Civilization 6 (DX12)
Originally penned by Sid Meier and his team, the Civ series of turn-based strategy games are a cult classic, and many an excuse for an all-nighter trying to get Gandhi to declare war on you due to an integer overflow. Truth be told I never actually played the first version, but every edition from the second to the sixth, including the fourth as voiced by the late Leonard Nimoy, it a game that is easy to pick up, but hard to master.
Benchmarking Civilization has always been somewhat of an oxymoron – for a turn based strategy game, the frame rate is not necessarily the important thing here and even in the right mood, something as low as 5 frames per second can be enough. With Civilization 6 however, Firaxis went hardcore on visual fidelity, trying to pull you into the game. As a result, Civilization can taxing on graphics and CPUs as we crank up the details, especially in DirectX 12.
Perhaps a more poignant benchmark would be during the late game, when in the older versions of Civilization it could take 20 minutes to cycle around the AI players before the human regained control. The new version of Civilization has an integrated ‘AI Benchmark’, although it is not currently part of our benchmark portfolio yet, due to technical reasons which we are trying to solve. Instead, we run the graphics test, which provides an example of a mid-game setup at our settings.
| AnandTech CPU Gaming 2019 Game List | ||||||||
| Game | Genre | Release Date | API | IGP | Low | Med | High | |
| Civilization VI | RTS | Oct 2016 |
DX12 | 1080p Ultra |
4K Ultra |
8K Ultra |
16K Low |
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All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
| AnandTech | IGP | Low | Medium | High |
| Average FPS |  |
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| 95th Percentile |  |
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At 1080p and 4K, the extra threads on the 2500X help a lot here.
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Smell This - Tuesday, February 12, 2019 - link
Thanks, Yall!"Where possible, we will extend out testing to include faster memory modules either at the same time as the review or a later date."
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It would be sweet with some OC action, too.
Most impressive is the jump between the AMD Ryzen 2500X/1500X and Ryzen 3 2300X/1300X --- roughly 10% +/-. Good work, AMD.
I guess this is the difference between Zen and Zen+. With 7nm Zen ++ arriving soon, and Zen+++ next year, the CPU times they are a changin' ...
mr_yogi - Tuesday, February 12, 2019 - link
Love the inclusion of the i5 2500K, great job.Valantar - Tuesday, February 12, 2019 - link
These are both available from Norwegian retailers, though prices are ... not good. The 2500X costs as much as the 2600X, and the 2300X is barely cheaper than the 2600 (though admittedly the 2600 is _really_ cheap).urbanman2004 - Tuesday, February 12, 2019 - link
Reviewing CPU's that'll never reach the mainstream open market. Smart idea Anandtech 😉mikato - Thursday, April 4, 2019 - link
Are you saying it doesn't count if they are sold in prebuilt systems?tygrus - Tuesday, February 12, 2019 - link
AMD APUs (2400G & 2300G) try to keep atleast 50% of the power budget for GPU so the CPU load graph doesn't show the whole picture. It shows the power used for all chips for CPU load not CPU+GPU load. While having a mixture of CPU-only & CPU+GPU chips present means you want to focus on the CPU the reader needs to be reminded that the CPU+GPU load will be higher.I wish AMD had option for 95w TDP APU to compete with Intel models. With more CPU cores/headroom and 25% more GPU to use that 95w+ peak.
azrael- - Wednesday, February 13, 2019 - link
One reason to favor the 2300X and 2500X over the 'G' series CPUs is that Pinnacle Ridge supports ECC whereas Raven Ridge does not.Icehawk - Wednesday, February 13, 2019 - link
I'm begging here - can you please, please, please show us your config settings for the HEVC encoding? You get rates that are 6x+ faster than I can achieve - my O/C'd 8700k gets ~45fps with 1080 Fast 3500 settings using all else as default in Handbrake. I'd really love to hit the #s you get with just an i5. Help!Ian Cutress - Friday, February 15, 2019 - link
Check page 3?https://www.anandtech.com/show/13945/the-amd-ryzen...
xrror - Wednesday, February 13, 2019 - link
One additional savings for OEMs - they won't need to populate the motherboard components for integrated video on systems shipped with these.No need for displayport/HDMI/VGA connectors and associated filtering bits, so that saves a bit more on total BOM for the OEM.