We know we have covered a series of leaks concerning AMD’s next-generation RYZEN CPU in the past few weeks, but this new one is the biggest of them all. A review that looks like it was published in paper form even before the NDA was lifted has been leaked out from a very reliable French PC hardware guru. The leak sheds light on a number of key performance details of the new Zen-based chip.
The RYZEN CPU used in the testing has the same clocks as we have seen thus far in various other leaked info — i.e. an all core turbo of 3.3. GHz, with a base clock of 3.15 GHz. That’s a slight deviance from AMD CEO Lisa Su’s assessment during the recently held New Horizon event that the final clocks would stand at over 3.4 GHz.
As for the review, it was conducted by trusted hardware guru Doc Teraboule for the popular French PC magazine CPCHardware. The clock speeds of the CPU used in the testing are as follows: Basic clock: 3.15 GHz | Turbo on-core: 3.5 GHz | Turbo all-core: 3.3 GHz.
These specs make it look like as though the review was conducted even before the New Horizon event held earlier this month. If that’s the case, then it is possible that the chip used in the testing was actually an engineering sample sent out to the press for an early review under NDA.
The initiation portion of the aggregate benchmarks consists entirely of details of render programs. Understandably so, a rendering program, after all, is well placed to benefit from every single available thread and at the same time, making the most out of all the resources of the processor with high efficiency. In layman’s terms, a render engine can squeeze out the last ounce of performance that can be expected to receive while running real-world application.
The following is the list of programs used in this testing:
- Blender 3D
- Corona Benchmark
- Encodage HB H.264 & H.265
- PovRay 3.7
- WPrime
- 3DSMax 2015 / Mental Ray
The performance of the AMD RYZEN in these tests was rather impressive, if not downright insane. It was able to outshine the six-core Intel Core i7-6800K that sets you back $434. However, it falls short of the Core i7-6900K by a huge margin — but that’s hardly surprising considering that the 6900K is a performance monster that costs above $1000.
Interestingly, the RYZEN CPU tested fared 60% better than the FX-8370 which happens to be the last of the eight-core AMD lineup.
As for the gaming benchmarks, the testing included the following titles:
- Anno 2070
- Arma III
- Battlefield 4
- Far Cry 4
- Grid: Auto Sport
- The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
- X3: Terran Conflict
Here, we would like to draw your attention to the inherent problem that lies with high-end, multi-core processors, namely the humble clock speed they bring along. You see, unlike render engines, game engines aren’t optimized to make the most out of all available threads. Rather, they rely on the clock speed, so as to speak. So, expectedly the RYZEN under scrutiny failed to outshine its counterparts from the Intel camp as they have higher clock rates.
As for power consumption, RYZEN beats its counterparts including the Core i7-6900K by drawing 93W compared to the 96W drawn by the latter (and 118W drawn by FX-8370).