There has already been said much about the Ryzen 7 1800X being better than many high-end Intel chips and how it offers a better value for money. But the processor is majorly for the power users who want the best performing silicon either for professional work or extreme gaming. And the AMD processor series that would go much more mainstream would be the Ryzen 5 lineup designed for the mass market.
The problem with Ryzen 5 series is that it hasn’t been launched yet and is expected to be launched towards the end of Q2 2017. We only have the basic information about the processor series and no details specifications are available yet. Hence, we don’t know how it would fare against the competition or the people interested in Ryzen processors should go ahead with the Ryzen 7 series or wait for Ryzen 5.
Thanks to the folks at zolkorn, we would at least have an idea how the quad-core Ryzen 5 processor will perform against the Intel Core i7-7700K, and for this, they tweaked the Ryzen 7 1800X CPU. Many AM4 motherboard makers introduced some flexible BIOS options that let the user toggle on or off the cores, threads and the L3 cache. By disabling half the cores/threads and the L3 cache, the team was able to replicate a quad-core Ryzen 5 processor.
The Benchmarks Compared
Ensuring a core for core, clock for clock comparison, both the processors remain equal and they were fixed at 4.0GHz. This is 200MHz more than the base clock of the 1800X and 200MHz underclocked for the Core i7 processor.
Both the processors can be seen running neck and neck in almost every benchmark result with either of the two taking leads in certain tests. Unsurprisingly, the Ryzen processor outpaced the Core i7 in a few notable tests including the multi-threaded Cinebench R15, 3DMark Fire Strike and Fire Strike Ultra physics tests.
Gaming Performance
In terms of gaming either, the AMD Ryzen processor remained very close to the 7700K and maintained a steady frame rate. The largest difference between the two was in the case of Far Cry Primal where the Intel processor got a lead by just over 10 percent.
These results become even more fascinating when the pricing of the AMD Ryzen 5 is taken into consideration. AMD has already announced that the Ryzen 5 processors will cost between $199 and $299. The cost benefit will also be significant in the case of AM4 motherboards that cost less than the Intel counterparts.