AMD Ryzen 5 1600X Specs, Price, Review: Better Than Intel i5 7600K for $250?
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) takes on the mainstream market with its release of the Ryzen 5 line of processors. Will the new Ryzen provide a competitive alternative to Intel's mainstream Core i5 chips?
AMD has just announced that the Ryzen 5 line of central processing units (CPU) are now available in four models, including two six-core CPUs in addition to a pair of quad-core models. The company has retweeted AMD president and chief executive officer Lisa Su's message on the launch of the Ryzen 5.
Even back when AMD first announced the midrange models for Ryzen 5, industry watchers already knew that the Ryzen 5 1600X chip, at about $250, was being positioned against Intel's Core i5. For the same price, Intel's Kaby Lake mainstream processor only has four cores and four threads, compared with Ryzen's six cores and twelve threads, as the in-depth article from Anandtech noted.
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At $249, the Ryzen 5 1600X sits at the high-end of the mainstream processors being introduced by AMD. With Intel's Core i5 7600K priced at $242, these two chips will be positioned to go head-to-head in the mainstream segment of the CPU market.
While the Ryzen 5 1600X has a huge advantage in the core and thread count, the Intel Core i5 7600K has the speed advantage per core. Ryzen runs at 3.6 GHz boostable to 4.0 GHz, while the Core i5 runs at 3.8 GHz to 4.2 GHz. Anandtech anticipates that Ryzen will win out in multi-threaded applications in which its core count shines, while the Core i5 will do better with single-threaded use cases that are more common for gaming.
Having run the new Ryzen 5 1600X against other Ryzen and Intel chips, most tech news outlets agree that the 1600X dominates on multi-thread tasks such as photo conversion, Cinebench, video transcoding and encryption. The Ryzen 5 chip is edged out, however, in games, especially those based on Direct X 9 or DX11.
For anyone doing intense CPU work, or for games using Direct X 12, the Ryzen 5 1600X wins hands down. Until games are better optimized for the Ryzen 5, however, Intel still wins out in the case of DX9 or DX11 gaming.
