
AMD Ryzen 5 1600X vs Core i5 Review - nedsma
http://www.anandtech.com/show/11244/the-amd-ryzen-5-1600x-vs-core-i5-review-twelve-threads-vs-four
======
jokr004
Just a heads up, you can view the entire article as one page by clicking the
"Print this Article" button: [http://www.anandtech.com/print/11244/the-amd-
ryzen-5-1600x-v...](http://www.anandtech.com/print/11244/the-amd-
ryzen-5-1600x-vs-core-i5-review-twelve-threads-vs-four)

~~~
hu3
the hero we need

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mda
Looks like AMD is the way to go for compilation workloads. Very impressive.
Check out the chromium compile benchmarks:

[http://www.anandtech.com/show/11244/the-amd-
ryzen-5-1600x-vs...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/11244/the-amd-
ryzen-5-1600x-vs-core-i5-review-twelve-threads-vs-four/9)

~~~
zeotroph
All these nice graphs, but only few publications get that an indicator towards
"better" (more points, fewer milliseconds, more fps, fewer watts) greatly
improves comprehension speed, especially when multiple graphs using different
metrics are used.

    
    
        <= better
           better =>

~~~
simlevesque
I'm not sure what you are complaining about but there is such an indicator on
the graph.

~~~
zeotroph
In the linked example it first says "Points" (implying more are better), and
then "Lower is better" for some timed benchmark. That is not and indicator but
text for which one has to slow down to read it, for _skimming_ over a lot of
graphs an arrow or triangle helps a lot, just like the already color-coded
bars do.

I can't remember where I saw it first, but for me at least it makes quite a
difference.

~~~
banachtarski
Better is on the top for all the graphs...

------
Insanity
The good thing about buying a slightly higher-end CPU is that it will last you
for quite a few years. I got my CPU close to its release (2009) and don't feel
like I am missing out on anything.

Furhtermore turns out that the Ryzen 5 matches the price that my current CPU
is selling for at the moment. I have an Intel i7 860 (1st gen). I still don't
think that I would benefit from upgrading at this point.

Of course, I use my system mostly just for writing code. Friends of me who are
into computer animation and design follow changes in the hardware world more
closely than I do. (And gamers as well).

~~~
neogodless
I agree. Still running a Phenom XII 940. Of course I've been upgrading the HDD
all along (went through a Raptor, a VelociRaptor, an early 80GB SSD and
finally a 256GB Samsung), and put in a new video card about four years ago
(don't play latest games, anyway.)

The Phenom cost me... $220. So the Ryzen 5 1600 has my name written all over
it. But really, it would just make some things I do on my computer a little
quicker. It would not have the profound effect that switching to an SSD did,
in my opinion. I'll let the idea bake for a while.

~~~
simonsquiff
I'm the same - Phenom II, upgraded to SSD and new graphics but that's it.

When you say this has your name written on it, are they socket compatible? The
idea of changing motherboards/ memory etc isn't compelling - I'd just get a
new system - but if you can drop these in then it's really tempting.

~~~
neogodless
Nope, I mean, spending the same amount as I did 8 years ago, and getting 8
years out of this new CPU sounds appealing to me! But I've got a uATX case, so
my motherboard selection is mildly limited. I don't mind swapping out a
motherboard. I used to do it rather frequently, for myself and for others.

I believe the socket I have now is AM2+, which is not at all compatible with
AM4. I'd also need new RAM. Overall, I'd expect to spend close to $400.

------
api
TL;DR: Intel is still faster for single-threaded tasks, but the AMD with all
its cores and threads demolishes on parallel work loads. It doesn't lag far
behind on single threaded performance either, so overall it's a big winner
unless your application is stubbornly dependent on single threaded
performance.

------
saosebastiao
I'm extremely excited for a competitive AMD again. Hats off to Lisa Su for
turning around a fallen company.

Just to make my wants clearer, I would love to have a Ryzen-based APU in a NUC
like form factor. I have a 6th gen Intel i5 NUC, but would happily scrap it
for a graphics system that plays nicer with linux.

~~~
kirse
_turning around a fallen company_

AMD has been going through this cycle of down-and-turnaround for decades now.
They tend to be like Microsoft OSes in that every other CPU architecture is
the one that does really well, giving Intel some trouble... until Intel
decides to crush AMD with lower prices and existing OEM/supplier
relationships.

Give it a couple years, AMD stock will be back down pushing new lows, at which
point you can scoop up some shares and ride it out a few years for the next
big win. AMD sticks around moreso because Intel needs them to exist, otherwise
Intel would be a straight monopoly.

~~~
tjoff
It hasn't been a cycle in forever, only down down down. AMD has not been
relevant in high performance consumer computers for about a decade! (for CPUs,
GPUs is another matter entirely)

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jrimbault
I wasn't actually reading the news at the time but:

 _No one ever got fired for buying Intel (2000)_ [0]

It seems this is still AMD biggest issue ?

[0]:
[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/11/27/no_one_ever_got_fir...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/11/27/no_one_ever_got_fired/)

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hedora
"All the Ryzen 5 parts will support DDR4 ECC and non-ECC memory"

This is huge for the NAS market. Mainstream intel parts do not support ECC.

~~~
gozzoo
What makes NAS more different than other systems in regard of ECC?

~~~
nfriedly
There's a presumption that NAS stores more-important-than-average data, so an
error is a bigger deal.

Also NAS systems often have check-summing and redundancy on the disk, but if
an error happened in RAM, then that error will be propagated into the checksum
and redundant copies.

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redsummer
I learnt on another HN thread that Ryzen is now working on Mac. 10.9 only at
the moment, but hopefully that will change:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntJLxbwurK4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntJLxbwurK4)

~~~
Rumudiez
Most interestingly to me, is that means OS X 10.9 is running DDR4, even though
no Apple product to date that I'm aware of has shipped with anything faster
than 2133MHz DDR3.

[edit for highest DRAM frequency offered by Apple]

------
tmsldd
Welcome back AMD. And of course, no doubt Intel has reaction power..
Competition is great!

------
neogodless
What are the most comparable benchmarks to web development work (i.e. Visual
Studio compile/publish/debugging), or what do you recommend for making
educated decisions around purchasing a CPU specifically for building software?

~~~
cjbprime
Seems like the answer that more threads are better, and Ryzen has more
threads.

~~~
user5994461
Higher frequency is better. Most web languages are single threaded. Most
operations, opening your IDE, running tests are also single threaded.

~~~
the8472
> opening your IDE, running tests are also single threaded

That very much depends on the IDE and testing framework

~~~
rsynnott
Yeah, I'm not sure what IDE they're talking about, but certainly IntelliJ will
happily use 800% CPU, causing the fans to spin up impressively, when starting
up/reindexing/doing any of the slow things that IntelliJ likes to do.

~~~
user5994461
Glad to learn that the reindexing is multi threaded :)

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llomlup
Finally, multicore for the masses. A 6C12T based workstation is also a sweet
spot for development work.

~~~
jacquesm
Multicore has been 'for the masses' for a decade or more by now, even in
mobile phones. What is different here than with other chips made by Intel or
AMD that makes you say that?

~~~
floatboth
Intel's offerings with more than 4 cores have been segregated into an
"enthusiast"/HEDT platform (X99) with more expensive mainboards and the CPUs
have been overpriced too.

Ryzen is reasonably priced & has one socket for the 4, 8 and 6 core CPUs.

~~~
jacquesm
4 cores still is multicore though.

But ok, I see what you mean: anything with more than 4 cores that is
affordable.

------
mmanfrin
Mildly off topic but still on topic: Last night I was looking at user
benchmarks for the Ryzen 7 vs the newer i7s and it looked like the i7s were
beating the R7s in almost every practical category. I thought the R7 was
supposed to be the 'bigger performance' sort of chip, but it can't seem to
beat the i7, which hasn't really had a big performance boost in 5 years.
What's going on? Is it that software testing the chips has not been updated to
take advantage of the fancy new technology in the R7? Or is Intel just so far
ahead that the R7 is a catch-up?

~~~
AsyncAwait
There are a couple of things going on here:

\- Ryzen is weaker in single-core IPC than KL, (it's at Broadwell levels) and
many benchmarks are single core optimised. \- There are lots of optimisations
by software vendors as well as fixes by AMD yet to come, (a couple were
already released) \- Most of the coverage focuses on gaming, where Intel wins
hands down, because of the better single-core performance \- The Ryzen i7 is
really aimed at content creators who export a lot of photos or 4K video and
developers who do a lot of compilation, basically tasks that require and
benefit from multiple cores - in those categories, the $500 Ryzen is neck and
neck with the $1000 i7 Extreme CPU, this is where it really shines and is
worth considering.

The reason why most of the benchmarks are aimed at gamers and thus favour
single-core IPC is because the PC market is such that if you want anything
decent, you have to be a gamer.

Want a good mechanical keyboard? It's going to be a gaming keyboard etc.
because the Pro market is much smaller than the gaming market and thus these
CPUs are rarely shown in comparisons where they really shine, one exception is
here:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIIb5uZfukU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIIb5uZfukU)

~~~
cookiecaper
Good non-gaming keyboard: [https://www.kinesis-
ergo.com/shop/advantage2/](https://www.kinesis-ergo.com/shop/advantage2/)

I agree on most other points. It is sad that good equipment is hard to get
without a bunch of lights and MEGA-XXXTREME!!! stickers/labeling all over the
place.

I think the thing is that the gaming market is the largest "prosumer" market
in the space. For real enterprises, they charge ridiculous markups on
something similar to the gaming parts but labeled "professional" or
"enterprise". For normal people, they produce the budget parts, because most
people don't really care as long as Facebook works. The middle market in PC
parts is gamers, enthusiasts who are willing to spend a little more to get
decent quality/performance.

------
obstinate
It's pretty wild that a CPU can have this much of an effect on game
framerates. That definitely defied my expectations. I'm also fascinated that
it's much worse on some games, and much better on others.

Personally, I use my GPU for video encoding and mostly play games in the
categories where Ryzen seems to underperform, so I won't be picking one of
these up. But it's nice to know that AMD is bringing the heat on this front.

~~~
exhilaration
> I'm also fascinated that it's much worse on some games, and much better on
> others.

That's due to the all the Intel-specific optimizations that game companies
have done. Here's an article about it:

[http://www.pcworld.com/article/3185466/hardware/heres-
proof-...](http://www.pcworld.com/article/3185466/hardware/heres-proof-that-
ryzen-can-benefit-from-optimized-game-code.html)

 _" Every processor is different on how you tune it, and Ryzen gave us some
new data points on optimization," Oxide’s Dan Baker told PCWorld. "We’ve
invested thousands of hours tuning Intel CPUs to get every last bit of
performance out of them, but comparatively little time so far on Ryzen."_

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otterpro
For a home server/NAS (or PC that runs 24/7), it's a "maybe" for me. According
to the article, power consumption of Ryzen 1500x(65W TDP) at core is about 49
watts, while the Intel i5-7400 (65W TDP) sits at 30 watts at the core under
full load. The difference is significant enough, not just in electric power
consumption, but also for CPU cooling/heat and noise consideration.

As for desktop, I'd give Ryzen a serious consideration, but the motherboards
are still at a premium or out of stock.

~~~
thomastjeffery
> the motherboards are still at a premium or out of stock.

Premuim? Not at all. Compare AM4 motherboards with Socket 2011v3, and you will
see a huge price difference. There are plenty of decent AM4 boards to be had
around $100. The cheapest 2011v3 board on newegg.com is $140. Higher end
2011v3 boards approach $600.

Out of stock? A quick glance at newegg doesn't show any out of stock. Where
are you looking?

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sp332
I'm curious why so many of these charts show the 1600X beating the 1800X. This
surprises me and it's not mentioned in the article that I could see.

------
Yhippa
Off-topic: what's the benefit of the Wraith coolers? A decent pack-in for
cheaper than what you'd get aftermarket?

~~~
onli
A decent cooler for effectively $0, since it comes included in the boxed
version, which is mostly not more expensive than the tray version without the
cooler.

------
DrNuke
Metal seems good & upgradable for deep learning but reports say software is
nowhere near the Intel environment yet.

~~~
floatboth
Software? You mean like firmware? Every new platform has problems with that…
IIRC Intel X99 massively sucked at launch

------
mamcx
I wish Ryzen be useful for hackintosh, but is currently ill-advised to go
there...

------
dantillberg
When considering the switch from Intel to AMD, don't be fooled by comparing
clock speeds! Intel has been ahead of AMD in the performance-per-clock game
for a long time, and while some of these benchmarks look more promising than
my disappointing experience (buying Magny Cours, and later upgrading to
Interlagos), less-expensive (and lower TDP) Intel CPUs in many of these
benchmarks still come out ahead of Ryzen. The tests where the Ryzen does shine
generally seem to involve parallel workloads, but bear in mind that most of
the stuff you wait for your computer to do are still bottlenecked by a single
thread.

~~~
arca_vorago
I disagree. It's all dependent on use case, but as a sysadmin I have seen real
world use cases where people are doing multiple things at once and one
bottlenecked program on an intel will slow the system to a halt whereas the
AMD will keep chugging on the rest of the multitasking going on, and that's a
very real benefit.

For example, how many people these days actuall just run with one monitor and
do just one thing at a time? I certainly don't, and for example, on my i7
laptop, if I have firefox up on the second monitor and play cs-go, I get 20fps
less. That never happened on my AMD FX system...

In essence what I am saying is parallel workloads are becoming the norm, and
thats why I'm betting on AMD in the long run.

The world where everything is single-threaded is quickly shrinking, and the
world where people only do one thing is as well. For example, lots of game
engines traditionally had this problem, but they are getting better and better
and multi-threading for perf gains.

~~~
noir_lord
Developers as well, I generally have 2-4 vagrant machines running in the
background, a heavy IDE and a bunch of other things all doing things.

6 cores and 12 threads vs my current i5-3570K starts to look interesting, very
interesting.

------
jlebrech
If you want decent upgrade path go for a 1151 based chipset, AMD CPUs are
spread out over too many sockets.

I'm considering getting a i3 or i5 based setup and upgrading to a 1151 i7 a
year or two later.

~~~
ptrptr
Many sockets? From 2017 there is only one - AM4 and it's future-proof.

~~~
sp00ls
Future proof? People still say that? Nothing in computing is future proof as
evidenced by the many different connector/socket types in just the last couple
years.

~~~
striking
How many sockets has AMD had in "just the last couple years"?

Right, the AM3 socket started being sold February 2009, and AM3+ was entirely
compatible with that.

[edit] Also: FM2, targeting a different range of performance, came out in
2012. Again, FM2+ was backwards compatible there too. Still five years since a
non-backwards-compatible AMD chipset.

You might be thinking about Intel's practices.

~~~
onli
To be fair, after AM3 there was also FM1, FM2, FM2+, AM1 and AM2.

~~~
striking
AM1/2 are older than AM3. And you're right that FM1/2/2+ exist, but FM2 came
out in 2012 and FM2+ was backwards compatible with FM2 CPUs. FM chipsets
targeted a different range of performance, so I consider the updates to those
chipsets orthogonal to the AM series.

Thanks for pointing out the FM series, though; I've modified my comment to
reflect this.

~~~
onli
Made a mistake there, you are right, partly. The AM2 is indeed the older AM3,
I meant only the AM1, which was a recent platform for some processors with a
low TDP. Not very known, it is no surprise it wasn't on your radar.

~~~
dragontamer
AM1 was a competitor to Intel's Atom chips. Which have no socket at all!

AM1 was very niche, but a socket for ~20W CPUs is outstanding. You can pair
any AM1 motherboard (down to $20 crap) with any AM1 CPU ($20 crap to $100 less
crap). Good for HTPCs and NAS machines... when you need a "serious" Raspberry
Pi ish machine with x86 compatibility, AM1 was my choice.

~~~
onli
I agree. Those were nice cpus and it is not a bad thing that they had a
socket. I did not list them as a negative point, but to show that AMD had more
sockets in the last time than AM3+, which could maybe partly explain OPs
misconception that AMD spread their cpus over them more than Intel. When FM2+
got upgrades while AM3+ got them as well, it was indeed a strange split. That
is was nothing compared what Intel does with their platform segmentation seems
to have got lost.

