Shots have been fired and competition raises the level of heat to the new dimension. The newest release of the AMD processor family is here to make us question the choice of chips that tiny bit more. Those who are into comparing two giants of the industry shall be on cloud nine. That is due to the speculations about the winner in this specific category which promise to stay for a while. A few months ago one could be very confident and precise how one manufacturer is better than another one when it comes to the chips, AMD Ryzen is here to challenge the Goliath.
Have you ever heard someone naming an Intel processor as their favorite? We face a huge wall of consumers’ faith and reliability to back it up. Fair to say, there was no suitable contestant for taking Intel’s place in niche market dominance. How is that possible? Today we will investigate reasons and outcomes of AMD introducing their Ryzen child and see where does it have an edge over Intel Core CPUs.
More cores, smaller price.
Release of these processors was a direct hit on Intel’s dominance of the mid-spec market, where the prices, efficiency, and reliability were on their side. Ryzen 5 takes on the Core i5 series. AMD’s multi-threading policy is clearly visible, as the main accent of the new product focuses on a 4 cores, 8 threads or 6 cores, 12 threads system, which is up to 1.5 times more than Intel is ready to present with its Core i5. The older Ryzen representatives are purely for digital creators which are circling around video processing or 3D modeling. 5th line is a match for seasoned gamers. Guys in AMD did their homework and adjusted those CPUs to replicate the needs of modern games, leaving just enough cores and threads to cope with any workload games have to offer. Valuation of the 6-core chip will match Intel’s quad-core. A pure treasure for gamers with a reasonable budget. You can get a solid middle-tier chip with a bigger functionality and Hyper-Threading for the same price. If you need just 4 cores, it would be even cheaper to get a Ryzen 5 1500x with a Wraith Spire cooler.
Reasonable frequencies.
Ryzen 5 1600x has a base frequency of 3.6 and 16 MB of L3 cache. Same amount of cache is present in 1500x and 1600 as well. Both 1500x and 1600x include XFR (Extended Frequency Range). Overclocking is a thing and there is a reasonable amount of frequency that you can boost manually, providing you have an appropriate cooling setup. Speaking of which, some enthusiasts have managed to overclock Ryzen 5 1600x and get a staggering 5.9 GHz result. It only took liquid nitrogen to get the chip to -170 degrees Celsius. That is a record-breaking result, by the way. Note that 1600x does not come with a Wraith type cooler and you will need to get yourself something useful single-handedly. If you are looking for a solid performance which will allow you to render a video while playing Mass Effect: Andromeda on ultra settings, you have come to a right place. This is where AMD wins comfortably. Add to that a $60-80 price decrease. Just don’t forget to get a worthy GPU before starting to throw rocks at us.
Versatility through multitasking
Ryzen processors feature a bunch of technologies which can satisfy anyone from a random gamer to content creators and streamers with huge experience. AMD SenseMI technology adds true machine intelligence to Ryzen CPUs. For true geeks that might be reading this, Precision Boost method is present, allowing the chip to increase or decrease the resource consumption and productivity according to what your rig needs at one particular moment. You can play the game and be certain that a precise amount of power will be used to cope with immediate tasks. For some people it is the most important criterion. Neural network principles are used, so the chip will literally think before attempting to complete the action. This leads to better performance while seeing to more than one task at a time. Well, if your primary use of PC is to do the homework or order essays, AMD Ryzen 5 would be as important for you as sunglasses for caterpillar.
What is our verdict? Though many AMD fans were claiming that Ryzen will become THE processor of dreams, packed with multitasking, using more cores and threads, higher frequency and possibility to overclock the chips massively, it is a wrong assumption. Worth saying that AMD’s primary goal was to create a product that would be matching and sometimes exceeding the capabilities of Intel’s CPUs. And they have coped with it brilliantly. Ryzen value proposition will allow you to get a CPU that will succeed in performing many tasks simultaneously for cheaper price.
