The first ever AMD Ryzen 5 review has been leaked out to the web about a week ahead of the official end to the NDA on April 11. The review was leaked out by Elchapuzasinformatico and it sheds light on several aspects related to the overall performance of the forthcoming processor.
AMD Ryzen 5 1600 specs, release date, price
The Ryzen 5 1600 is going to be released along with other Ryzen 5 series processor on April 11. The lineup is spearheaded by the six-core, multithreaded mainstream chip, the Ryzen 5 1600.
The new chips is going to be priced at $219 and it brings you six cores and 12 threads. The chip sports a base clock speed of 3.2 GHz and a boost clock speed of 3.6 GHz while the TDP stands at 95W. It packs 16 MB of L3 cache and is expected to lock horns with Core i5 based chips if we are to consider the price point.
AMD Ryzen 5 1600 performance score [leaked review]
The chip was tested on a $300 MSI X370 XPOWER Gaming Titanium motherboard along with the G.Skill Trident Z32 GB memory clocked at 2400 MHz.
Despite the kit being rated at 3600 MHz, the platform could not keep up with anything higher than 2400 MHz. Worth noting that ever since launch, Ryzen processors have suffered from memory incompatibility issues that render the chips unable to operate their memory on the AM4 platform at higher speeds.
The benchmarks begin with single core performance tests where the Ryzen 5 1600 offers as much speed as the Ryzen 7 1700X — both based on the same architecture. This performance is significantly lower compared to Intel’s unlocked Core i5 and i7.
In multi-threaded benchmarks, however, the Ryzen 5 1600 was able to outperform the Intel Core i7 7700K by big margins in CPU-Z test. The chip also managed to come close to the Core i7 7700K — a rather impressive feat considering that it costs around $150 or so less than the Intel chip. The same can be said for Cinebench R15 tests where the Core i7 chip was outperformed by the Ryzen 5 1600.
AMD Ryzen 5 1600 gaming benchmarks
As for the gaming benchmarks, in Unigine and synthetic 3DMark tests, the chip’s performance is remarkably close to the Skylake based Intel Core i7 6700K and on par with the Ryzen 7 1700X. In fact, in a select few tests, the Ryzen 5 CPU even outshines its eight-core counterpart.
At 1080p, the CPU seems to be capable of delivering a faster performance compared to the Ryzen 7 1700 in most tests. Although, it lags considerably behind the Core i7 6700K. Meanwhile, the performance gap becomes somewhat smaller at 4K and there is not much difference between the performances by the Ryzen 5 1600 and the Core i7 6700K. The only major difference in 4K gaming was seen during Metro Redux where there was a difference of 15 FPS.
Summing up all the tests, it is obvious that gamers who prefer to play in low resolution will find the Intel chips at their disposal faster and more reliable. When it comes to 4K gaming, Intel does lead the charts by a small margin — but most gamers won’t probably pay heed to that gap considering that the Ryzen 5 chip costs considerably less.