AMD Zen 3 Ryzen Deep Dive Review: 5950X, 5900X, 5800X and 5600X Tested
by Dr. Ian Cutress on November 5, 2020 9:01 AM ESTGaming Tests: Borderlands 3
As a big Borderlands fan, having to sit and wait six months for the EPIC Store exclusive to expire before we saw it on Steam felt like a long time to wait. The fourth title of the franchise, if you exclude the TellTale style-games, BL3 expands the universe beyond Pandora and its orbit, with the set of heroes (plus those from previous games) now cruising the galaxy looking for vaults and the treasures within. Popular Characters like Tiny Tina, Claptrap, Lilith, Dr. Zed, Zer0, Tannis, and others all make appearances as the game continues its cel-shaded design but with the graphical fidelity turned up. Borderlands 1 gave me my first ever taste of proper in-game second order PhysX, and it’s a high standard that continues to this day.
BL3 works best with online access, so it is filed under our online games section. BL3 is also one of our biggest downloads, requiring 100+ GB. As BL3 supports resolution scaling, we are using the following settings:
- 360p Very Low, 1440p Very Low, 4K Very Low, 1080p Badass
BL3 has its own in-game benchmark, which recreates a set of on-rails scenes with a variety of activity going on in each, such as shootouts, explosions, and wildlife. The benchmark outputs its own results files, including frame times, which can be parsed for our averages/percentile data.
| AnandTech | Low Resolution Low Quality |
Medium Resolution Low Quality |
High Resolution Low Quality |
Medium Resolution Max Quality |
| Average FPS |  |
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| 95th Percentile |  |
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All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
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LithiumFirefly - Friday, November 6, 2020 - link
I thought the whole point to a civilization game benchmark was a time to complete turn not FPS who cares about FPS and a turn-based game.dagobah123 - Friday, November 6, 2020 - link
The more benchmarks the better. These are general purpose CPUs. Wouldn't it be a shame if you bought a 120hz+ 4k monitor with an expensive graphics card, only to find out your CPU was limiting your frames? Sure the game is playable @ 5 FPS as the author mentioned. However, it's getting harder to make the CPU the bottleneck in a lot of these games at higher resolutions and quality settings, so they have to resort to this. Would anyone play a game @ 360p? No, but if you want to see which CPU is better I say lets include every benchmark we can find.CookieBin - Friday, November 6, 2020 - link
I find it funny that these huge gains mean literally nothing at 4K. So all these different review sites highlight sky high fps at 1080p because at 4K that huge advantage becomes less than a 0.3% improvement.. keep pounding sand linus tech tips. I've never seen such a big nothing burger. No idiot out there buys a $800 5950X to play video games at 1080p.chuyayala - Friday, November 6, 2020 - link
The reason they test 1080p is because game processing is CPU-bound at that resolution (they are testing the CPU after-all). The higher the resolution, the more the GPU is working (not the CPU). The reason why there aren't much gains in 4k is because processing is limited by the GPU power. If we assume we get ultra powerful GPUs that can run 4k games at 120+ frames per second, then the CPU becomes more important.dagobah123 - Friday, November 6, 2020 - link
This is simply not true. It only appears to 'mean nothing' if you don't realize the bottleneck in the testing system on most of the benchmarks are the GPU. Meaning the GPU is maxed out at 100%. In this case you're right, the difference between many CPUs will not matter, but what about next year when you decide to buy the next high-end GPU, only to find out the CPU you choose couldn't handle much more. This is why 360p, 720p, even 1080p benchmarks are included to show you just how much more ahead one CPU is over another. Check out the test setup--they are using a 2080 Ti. Come check out the updated reviews after they test all this on 3090s and 6900 XTs.Pit a Ferarri and a Ford Model T against one another. Sure they both keep up with one another in the grocery parking lot @ 15mph. Take em out on the freeway with a 70mph speed limit and you'll have a clear winner. Let alone let em loose on the race track.
Future proof yourself a bit, buy a 5600k or 5800k for your 4k gaming. If you don't update your CPU often you'll be glad you did a couple years out if you drop in that next GPU.
nandnandnand - Saturday, November 7, 2020 - link
5950X will make your web browsing snappier... so you can load more AnandTech ads. ;)zodiacfml - Sunday, November 8, 2020 - link
duh? Steam survey shows 1080p the most popular resolution for gaming. Aside from that, it is difficult to maintain frame rates for 240Hz/360Hz monitors.You might have a point with 720p res though
realbabilu - Friday, November 6, 2020 - link
First: I think you should compare with F or KF Intel version, for price comparison. Since they don't have internal Gpu. Somehow AMD not included the FAN also, beware good cooling isn't cheap.SECOND: it's nice to had coding bench with optimization here windows, with AVX2 and some flags compiling, Amd only provide optimization compiling on Linux only, I think they should be on windows too with optimized math kernel and compiler.
ThIrd: the price performance is justified now. In zen2 release the price was lower than Intel that time, made Intel justified the price for 10th Gen. Now from price sensitive, Intel still fine per price / performance ratio,even though it's need more power consumption.
duploxxx - Saturday, November 7, 2020 - link
the ryzens have a base TDP of 105W and peaking towards 140-150Wnot like the intels that peak at +200ish W, there you need good cooling.
A Dark rock slim or shadow rock can easily handle this and it will cost you 50-60$..
go find a cooler for the +200W so that it wont throttle all the time for the Intel
realbabilu - Saturday, November 7, 2020 - link
Great. I think Anand tech should do cooling shootout for 5900x/5950x bench.To find the minimum air cooler for this,
AMD only list noctua and bequiet as air cooler, others as liquid cooler at https://www.amd.com/en/processors/ryzen-thermal-so...
The slim rock and nh14s maybe the cheapest on the list. It is interesting could more budget double fan tower should enough for 5900x/5950x that has 145 watt max like deepcool gammax 400 pro (double fan), coolermaster ma410p, and shadow rock 2/3, and maybe cheapest aio coolermaster liquid master 120 lite that not listed on amd list.