AMD Zen 3 Ryzen Deep Dive Review: 5950X, 5900X, 5800X and 5600X Tested
by Dr. Ian Cutress on November 5, 2020 9:01 AM ESTCPU Tests: Synthetic
Most of the people in our industry have a love/hate relationship when it comes to synthetic tests. On the one hand, they’re often good for quick summaries of performance and are easy to use, but most of the time the tests aren’t related to any real software. Synthetic tests are often very good at burrowing down to a specific set of instructions and maximizing the performance out of those. Due to requests from a number of our readers, we have the following synthetic tests.
Linux OpenSSL Speed: SHA256
One of our readers reached out in early 2020 and stated that he was interested in looking at OpenSSL hashing rates in Linux. Luckily OpenSSL in Linux has a function called ‘speed’ that allows the user to determine how fast the system is for any given hashing algorithm, as well as signing and verifying messages.
OpenSSL offers a lot of algorithms to choose from, and based on a quick Twitter poll, we narrowed it down to the following:
- rsa2048 sign and rsa2048 verify
- sha256 at 8K block size
- md5 at 8K block size
For each of these tests, we run them in single thread and multithreaded mode. All the graphs are in our benchmark database, Bench, and we use the sha256 and md5 results in published reviews.
GeekBench 5: Link
As a common tool for cross-platform testing between mobile, PC, and Mac, GeekBench is an ultimate exercise in synthetic testing across a range of algorithms looking for peak throughput. Tests include encryption, compression, fast Fourier transform, memory operations, n-body physics, matrix operations, histogram manipulation, and HTML parsing.
I’m including this test due to popular demand, although the results do come across as overly synthetic, and a lot of users often put a lot of weight behind the test due to the fact that it is compiled across different platforms (although with different compilers).
We have both GB5 and GB4 results in our benchmark database. GB5 was introduced to our test suite after already having tested ~25 CPUs, and so the results are a little sporadic by comparison. These spots will be filled in when we retest any of the CPUs.
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Spunjji - Sunday, November 8, 2020 - link
No, that's meyeeeeman - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link
Ian, you need to buy some new servers for anandtech.com now that AMD has launched zen 3.The site is barely loading.
DigitalFreak - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link
I wonder if they're still running on the last hardware upgrade Anand did.Ryan Smith - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link
Nah, we're a couple of generations past that now.Phiro69 - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link
As far as I can tell, it's cloudfront having problems, not Anandtech's backend. I would be surprised if they aren't 100% cloud based at this point, too.gagegfg - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link
This is what I expected from AMD, 10 years but it came !!gagegfg - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link
Athlon 64 X2 2005 = 15 añosTomatotech - Monday, November 9, 2020 - link
15 anuses? Surely it’s not *that* bad ;)ahenriquedsj - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link
In competitive games it is a massacre.Double Trouble - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link
What AMD has been able to achieve over the past few years is definitely impressive, and this 5000 series CPU set is excellent. However, I do wonder if climbing up the price / segment chart is going to take a toll. For me, I've upgraded 5 PC's from older CPU's to Ryzen 5 3600 and 3600X because the price was very reasonable (about $170). With a minimum of $300 for the new 5600X, that's almost double the price, so I won't be buying any for a long time. The 5000 series is impressive, but not worth that kind of a steep price. I wonder if a lot of other buyers might be in the same boat.