Review: AMD Ryzen 5 1500X and Ryzen 5 1600X (14nm Zen)

Conclusion

Now over a month on from the initial Ryzen launch, AMD is populating the stack by introducing four more chips under the Ryzen 5 banner. The 1400 and 1500X CPUs offer four cores and eight threads while 1600 and 1600X up the ante to six and 12, thus offering a core topology that is currently missing from rival Intel's catalogue.

Whilst the underlying Zen architecture is far more potent than anything AMD has delivered before, the Ryzen CPUs still have an IPC deficit compared to Intel's Kaby Lake chips. AMD smartly sidesteps this potential hurdle by offering either more cores and threads or significantly lower pricing.

Ryzen 5 plays particularly well with those who can take liberal advantage of cores and threads, evidenced by our bang4buck graphs on the previous page, where AMD makes a clean sweep. The situation is less clear cut for single-threaded applications but, and it's a big one, Ryzen 5 is above average from every metric that we care to take a look at.

And now with far better motherboard stability and lower-cost boards available, there are a lot of tangible reasons to consider a Ryzen 5 for the next £1,000 base-unit build.

Yet it's not all perfect. A few question-marks do remain. One is whether the SMT gaming issues will be fixed sooner rather than later, and for the enthusiast that likes to overclock, there isn't much headroom in the Zen core presently.

What we do come away with is the feeling that AMD has done well in tying together value, performance and energy efficiency. Ryzen 5, the mainstream offering, is a solid all-rounder for folks who don't want to spend more than £250 on a chip.

AMD Ryzen 5 1500X and 1600X

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TBC.

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