AMD released their 1st Gen Ryzen series of CPUs way back in 2017. Prior to Ryzen, AMD’s FX series CPUs, APUs struggled badly against Intel for almost a decade. All this changed when the very first Ryzen, codenamed “Summit Ridge” was released. It was the greatest, fastest thing AMD had launched in a very long time.
Even though Ryzen 3/5/7 1xxx were fast, power efficient and VFM, they still lagged behind in performance compared to what Intel had to offer. When 2ndGen “Pinnacle Ridge” CPUs launched, they narrowed the gap that existed with the then prevailing Intel line-up of CPUs. They offered better performance, better clock speeds, and better power efficiency. AMD also transitioned from 14nm Fabrication process to 12nm.
Next in line was Ryzen 3XXX range of CPUs, codenamed “Matisse”. As expected, thanks to architectural tweaks, transition to 7nm fabrication process, the performance gap more or less equalled or was very marginal and that too mostly for single threaded applications which benefitted Intel’s higher core frequency. Multi-threaded performance was on par or better depending on the clock speed.
Ryzen 3XXX range was quite important because it introduced an entirely new line-up in the “Ryzen 9” which consisted of 12 core and 16 core parts. Earlier, be it AMD or Intel, mainstream platforms maxed out at 8 Cores. Beyond that was HEDT domain which again was dominated by Intel until very recently. That all changed when AMD unleashed the Ryzen Threadripper but we shall not delve much into that as it is not relevant to our today’s topic. For the first time in history, processors with more than 8 cores were available on mainstream platform. Ryzen 9 3900X and 3950X were game changers. The literally changed a lot of equations when it came to building or configuring high end gaming systems or workstations.
Ryzen 3XXX series also marked a much wider and larger acceptance from consumers, enterprise customers, gamers, content creators and so on. AMD finally had something for everyone and at every imaginable price point without compromising on performance. The golden age of AMD had arrived. It was a dream come true for all AMD fans and that too after a long time but trust us when we say that AMD wasn’t done just yet!
This year, although the entire globe was grappling with a calamity named Covid 19, not all was so dull and disappointing. AMD had something very exciting waiting to be unleashed. The brand new and highly anticipated Ryzen 5000 series processors are launching today, Nov 5th 2020.
Thanks to AMD for providing early samples of these new CPUs, we got to spend some time testing them and boy are we absolutely blown away. As if the 3XXX series CPUs weren’t impressive enough, AMD went overboard and gave us something even more amazing.
Ladies & gentlemen, welcome the new AMD Ryzen 5000 Series codenamed “Vermeer”.
Now that we are done with the formality of recap and formal introduction, without wasting much time, let’s get on with the fun part, shall we?
Test Setup -
MD Ryzen 5 5600X (6Cores/12Threads) Processor
AMD Ryzen 7 5800X (8Cores/16Threads) Processor
AMD Ryzen 9 5900X (12Cores/24Threads) Processor
AMD Ryzen 9 5950X (16Cores/32Threads) Processor
Asus ROG Crosshair VIII Impact Motherboard
Teamgroup T-Force Xtreem ARGB 3600MHz CL14 8GBx2 Dual Channel Kit
Custom Water Cooling for CPU
Nvidia Geforce GT710 2GB Graphics Card
Super Flower Leadex Gold 1600W Full Modular PSUA
Softwares & Benchmarks -
Windows 10 X64 Pro Build 2004 with latest updates installed.
(All other drivers, firmware, BIOS updated to latest public release versions.)
Geekbench 5
Cinebench R20
Cinebench R15
V-Ray
Corona Benchmark
Blender
Hwbot X265 1080p & 4K encoding benchmark
Cinebench R20 -
Cinebench is a real-world cross-platform test suite that evaluates your computer's hardware capabilities. Improvements to Cinebench Release 20 reflect the overall advancements to CPU and rendering technology in recent years, providing a more accurate measurement of Cinema 4D's ability to take advantage of multiple CPU cores and modern processor features available to the average user.
Cinebench R15 -
Cinebench is a real-world cross platform test suite that evaluates your computer's performance capabilities. Cinebench is based on MAXON's animation software CINEMA 4D 3D content creation.
Geekbench 5 -
Geekbench 5 is a cross-platform benchmark that measures your system's performance with the press of a button. How will your mobile device or desktop computer perform when push comes to crunch?
CPU Benchmark
Geekbench 5 measures your processor's single-core and multi-core power, for everything from checking your email to taking a picture to playing music, or all of it at once. Geekbench 5's CPU benchmark measures performance in new application areas including Augmented Reality and Machine Learning, so you'll know how close your system is to the cutting-edge.
Compute Benchmark
Test your system's potential for gaming, image processing, or video editing with the Compute Benchmark. Test your GPU's power with support for the OpenCL, CUDA, and Metal APIs. New to Geekbench 5 is support for Vulkan, the next-generation cross-platform graphics and compute API.
Cross-Platform
Compare apples and oranges. Or Apples and Samsungs. Designed from the ground-up for cross-platform comparisons, Geekbench 5 allows you to compare system performance across devices, operating systems, and processor architectures. Geekbench 5 supports Android, iOS, macOS, Windows, and Linux.
Geekbench 5 – Single Core -
Geekbench 5 – Multi Core -
V-Ray CPU Rendering -
V-Ray Benchmark is a free standalone application to help you test how fast your hardware renders. The benchmark includes two test scenes: one for V-Ray and another for V-Ray GPU, depending on the rendering engine you’re looking to measure.
With V-Ray Next Benchmark, you can quickly and easily evaluate your machine's performance capabilities running V-Ray Next. Discover how your computer ranks alongside others and learn how different hardware can influence your rendering speed. With V-Ray Next Benchmark, you can test the power and performance of your system and push components to their limits.
Blender -
Blender is the free and open source 3D creation suite. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modelling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, video editing and 2D animation pipeline.
Corona Benchmark -
Corona Renderer is a modern high-performance (un)biased photorealistic renderer, available for Autodesk 3ds Max, MAXON Cinema 4D, and as a standalone application.
The benchmark runs using Corona Renderer 1.3, which is an older version of Corona Renderer – updating the benchmark to a newer version of Corona Renderer would have no impact on the relative performance of 2 different CPUs and would only invalidate all the results gathered so far, so staying with the older version is actually useful from the point of view of a benchmark application.
HWBOT X265 Benchmark -
Developed by Czech developer and HWBOT member Havli, HWBOT x265 Benchmark is based on the open source x265 encoder. It can take advantage of modern CPUs instructions and scales well with multi-core processors. With two presets available, 1080p and 4k, the main workload involves converting H264 source video to H265/HEVC and measure average fps.
HWBOT X265 Benchmark – 1080p
HWBOT X265 Benchmark – 4K
Observations & Conclusions -
We have included 4 models from 3XXX Series to compare against the 5XXX so that it is easier to understand the performance delta between the older and newer models.
6/8/12/16 Core models of both series were included.
Memory was set at 3600MHz @ 14-15-15-35 1T @ 1.45V (XMP) for all tests.
Stock PBO boost, 4GHz,4.2 GHz,4.4GHz,4.5GHz (for models which could not do 4.6GHz), 4.6GHz, 4.7 GHz. Clock speed steps were used for same clock performance delta measurement.
As expected, older 3XXX series CPUs struggled past 4.2GHz. 4.4GHz was achievable because of superior custom water cooling but in our honest opinion, with regular AIO and High performance Air Cooling, 4.2 GHz is a realistic target.
5XXX series CPUs showcase a healthy 200-300MHz increment in all core clock speeds as compared to outgoing 3XXX CPUs.
As can be seen from the above graphs, at same clocks, and same core count, the new 5XXX CPUs are much faster at the same time requiring lesser voltage.
Lesser voltage, higher overall clock speeds indicate that the TSMC 7nm fabrication process has now matured pretty well. I guess in future we shall see even more improvement.
Another important aspect worth looking at is the improved Memory controller. Renoir showed significant improvement in max achievable IMC clock speed and keeping that in mind, 5XXX should show similar gains. We haven’t delved into that in this article. We shall be covering that in a different article.
With the AMD Ryzen 5XXX Series, AMD has finally overtaken Intel in every possible way in terms of sheer performance, cost, etc. Even single threaded performance is also not something Intel can boast about anymore. Great work AMD! Keep it up.