Ryzen 5 1600 performance showcased in early review

It looks like someone broke the Ryzen 5 street date as a Spanish site this week published an early review for the Ryzen 5 1600 CPU, using a retail sample obtained prior to the official release. The review is fairly comprehensive too, showing AMD's affordable 6-core in a wide range of benchmark tests.

Unbound by the restraints of non-disclosure, Iván Martinez of elchapuzasinformatico.com,  took the retail version of the Ryzen 5 1600 through the paces and saw some interesting results, further confirming that AMD's Ryzen has its good and its bad sides. First thing's first: the Ryzen 5 1600 is not the highest-performing chip in the AMD Ryzen 5 stable. Sitting shy of the top SKU (the 1600X), the 1600 clocks in at 3.2GHz, with 3.6GHz boost and, as a two-CCX design, it carries the full 16MB of L3 cache that we can see on the higher-end Ryzen 7 CPUs. The chip comes rated at 65W. The reviewed unit came equipped with an AMD Wraith cooler.

Facing off against several Core i7 and i5 CPUs, as well as a Ryzen 7 1700X, the Ryzen 5 1600 seems to provide some amount of surprise, in particular against its Ryzen 7 big brother, generally matching its performance core-for-core. In purely synthetic benchmarks like wPrime and CPU-Z, which leverage the number of cores, the Ryzen 5 scored well above Intel's quadcores, but naturally fell short of the 8-core/16-thread 1700X.

The review confirmed that benchmarks that rely on core count revealed the true power of the CPU, with its 6 cores / 12 threads really pulling ahead of Intel in just about every scenario, while memory benchmarks showed some dodgy latency (several levels worse than some A8 and A10 APUs and almost twice as much as an i7-4770K) with average read/write speeds. 1080p gaming revealed a competitive, albeit lower overall, performance than the Intel offering. 4K gaming did level out the playing field by putting the load on the GPU, making the CPU hardly break a sweat and generally proved that 4K is irrelevant (right now) to demonstrate Ryzen's CPU performance. You can find the graphs below, sourced from elchapuzoinformatico.com:

There is one serious caveat to take into consideration in the review: the reviewer, despite his best intentions, had to lower the RAM speed to get four slots to work together, and user testing has proved that memory speed and latency hold a huge sway on performance on Ryzen. The biggest hurdle for AMD right now stems from the partner boards which are still below par when it comes to memory support (in this case an MSI X370 XPower Gaming Titanium).

Finally, the site also confirmed the release date (April 11th), and the pricing for the entire Ryzen 5 family (in Euros), estimating an approximate upmark of 15% over US pricing:

• Ryzen 5 1600X will cost 285 Euros
• Ryzen 5 1600 will cost 249.95 Euros
• Ryzen 5 1500 will cost 215 Euros
• Ryzen 5 1400 will cost 195 Euros

KitGuru Says: While the review is just one of many that will soon hit the web, it does offer some idea of the bang-for-your-buck ratio. The fact that the reviewer was challenged by the DDR4-2400, seems to indicate that the review was conducted in sub-optimal conditions and shouldn't be the be-all-end-all of the Ryzen 5 reviews. We might see huge performance gains as board partners improve memory support. At the end of the day, this is a 250 Euro CPU which is performing on par with Intel's own offers.

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