AMD Ryzen 5 1600X (6C12T) CPU Review

1. Ryzen 5 1600X: Introduction & Overclocking2. Ryzen 5 1600X Overclocking3. Testing Methodology4. CPU Tests 1: Cinebench, Handbrake, x265 Encoding5. CPU Tests 2: 7-Zip, Kraken, WPrime6. CPU & Memory Tests: SiSoft Sandra7. Gaming Tests 1: FutureMark8. Gaming Tests 2: GTA V, Metro LL, Witcher 3 (DX11)9. Gaming Tests 3: Ashes, GoW4, ROTTR, Total War (DX12)10. 4K Gaming Tests: GoW4, GTA V, Witcher 311. 1440P Gaming With A GTX 107012. Technical: Power & Temperatures13. Closing Thoughts14. View All Pages

The market for people buying an expensive CPU and using it for gaming at 1080p is likely to be very slim. What 1080p does is give a good indication of the CPU's raw gaming performance as GPU power is sufficient to push frame rates to a level where the CPU and memory limitations can be observed.

We supplement the 1080p gaming results with a trio of games tested at 4K using the same Titan X Pascal graphics card that pushed through our 1080P suite. That saving against Intel's competing CPUs with similar core counts could buy a nice 4K monitor, so we will show how Ryzen 5 performs at such a resolution.

Gears of War 4

We run the built-in benchmark using a 4K resolution and the same settings as the 1080p test (Ultra quality preset, Async Compute enabled).

Game version 9.8.0.2 used for current testing (earlier version used for previous testing).

Note: The Core i7-2700K and i7-4790K are not shown in Gears of War 4 as the game download was too large to install on their system SSD and the clunky Windows Store platform gives errors when moving games installed on a secondary SSD between test systems.

Grand Theft Auto V

We run the built-in benchmark using a 4K resolution and the same settings as the 1080p test (generally Maximum quality settings including Advanced Graphics). VRAM usage at 4K, according to the built-in GTA V counter, is 4171MB.

The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt

We run our custom 107-second benchmark in a densely-populated town area using a 4K resolution and the same settings as the 1080p test (Maximum quality, Nvidia settings disabled).

With such onus being put on the Titan X Pascal graphics card’s capability at 4K, performance differences between Ryzen 5 and modern Core i5 processors are minor. GTA V continues to show its preference for Intel hardware by offering up a slight performance advantage on the Core i5. However, the differences in The Witcher 3 and Gears of War 4 are negligible.

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