AMD Ryzen 5 1600 Review Pops Up Ahead of Launch

These days, it seems like no major product can launch without some reviews leaking out ahead of launch. Next week, AMD is set to officially launch their new Ryzen 5 series of processors. However, we are already getting a good look at the performance due to various leak Ns. Today, there is even a full review for the Ryzen 5 1600 which puts the chip through the paces.

The Ryzen 5 1600 is the junior partner of the 1600X with 6 cores and 12 threads. Clocked 400 MHz lower, it has a base clock of 3.2 GHz, boost clock of 3.6 GHz, 3MB of L2 cache and 16MB of L3 cache. In Cinebench R15, it manages to outpace the i7 7700K and i7 5930K at 1123 points. For x264, the chip falls a bit short of the i7 5930K at 35.84 FPS compared to 39.32 FPS. For 3DMark, it has no trouble keeping up with the i7 6700K.

For gaming performance, however, the Ryzen 5 1600 falls a bit short. Generally, it comes in on par with the Ryzen 7 1700X and short of what Intel is capable of with their i7’s. This is in large part due to the relatively low clock speeds and optimisation issues faced by Ryzen. At $219 however, it would be more fair to compare it against the i5 lineup but I still expect Intel to have the edge in gaming, at least for the near future until games start utilising more than 4 cores on a regular basis.