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 |
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
AnandTech | IGP | Low | Medium | High |
Average FPS | ||||
95th Percentile |
At 1080p and 4K, the extra threads on the 2500X help a lot here.
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shticktical - Thursday, February 14, 2019 - link
Ian, why don't you include idle power consumption? And not just in this article, in all CPU reviews? System's usually spent 95% time idling. That would be very interesting to know and compare. Thank you!Ian Cutress - Friday, February 15, 2019 - link
Idle power consumption varies very wildly when you're talking about zero CPU load, and can be influenced more by the motherboard/system than the CPU itself. You can check the data in Bench regardless:https://www.anandtech.com/bench/CPU-2019/2183
RSAUser - Sunday, February 17, 2019 - link
Still disappointed that Anandtech cannot use a simple bar chart plugin like canvasjs in 2019.Would love the ability to add information on hover like the current market price, or MSRP, or make it so it fetches the price from the amazon or newegg api.
This is especially relevant in these charts where you're adding intel processors that are completely out of the price league of the CPU being reviewed and you're not adding the current price to the chart.
Using a JS library to render the HTML would make those charts mobile responsive.
fadsarmy - Monday, June 10, 2019 - link
How does a 65W cpu (Ryzen 5 2600) draw 77.97W?