AMD’s Ryzen 5000 series is no longer just a rumour, as the company has lifted the lid on several of its new processors, and even teased Big Navi at 4K ultra. The Ryzen 9 5950X, Ryzen 9 5900X, Ryzen 7 5800X, and Ryzen 5 5600X are all built on the brand new Zen 3 architecture, which AMD confidently states is its “most significant architectural update yet” – and yes, it has plenty of lofty figures to prove it.
We always recommend waiting for benchmarks before racing to get a preorder down ahead of the worldwide November 5 release, but it’s good to know what AMD is claiming its new chips can do.
For example, those wanting to upgrade from the Ryzen 3000 series to the Ryzen 5000 series can expect an average performance jump of up to 26% when gaming at 1080p using a high image quality preset, although this does include older titles like League of Legends and CS:GO. The Ryzen 9 5900X hitting 181 frames per second in Shadow of the Tomb Raider’s built-in benchmarking tool is nothing to scoff at, though, given that it’s 40 frames more than the Ryzen 9 3900XT.
So how is this possible when Zen 3 shares the same TSMC’s 7nm process as Zen 2? AMD has consolidated everything under the hood to unify the cores and cache of its new CPUs, which helps to improve the performance when a game is particularly demanding on a thread by reducing the latency. There is also a 19% uplift in instruction per cycle (IPC) gains.
All of this is a fancy way to say that the new Zen 3 architecture lets you crank up the resolution and settings of your game without your CPU breaking a sweat. There are plenty of examples that AMD gives where its Ryzen 9 5900X beats Intel’s current flagship i9-10900K, if you’d like to see for yourself.
The $549 flagship Ryzen 9 5900X sports 12 cores and 24 threads at a 3.7GHz base clock and 4.8GHz boost clock, all with access to a unified 70MB cache. And with 105W TDP, AMD is doing its best to keep things efficient. We might even have a new contender for the best gaming CPU, being the first of AMD’s processors to hit a score of 631 in Cinebench, compared to the Intel i9-10900K’s 544.
At $449, the Ryzen 7 5800X is slightly cheaper, but still packs eight cores and 16 threads at a higher 3.8GHz base clock and 4.7GHz boost clock. The cache is halved, however, at 36MB, and TDP remains the same.
For the budget-minded out there, the $299 Ryzen 5 5600X contains six cores and 12 threads at 3.7GHz / 4.6GHz. The cache is ever so slightly smaller at 35MB and the TDP drops to 65W.
And lastly, built with enthusiasts in mind, the Ryzen 9 5950X will set you back $799 for 16 cores and 32 threads. It’s AMD’s fastest processor with up to 4.9GHz boost clocks and a 72MB cache at the same 105W TDP. AMD touts it as the “highest single-thread performance of any desktop gaming processor,” which is an area the company has struggled with compared to its competitor in the past.
If you are upgrading from a previous generation, then you’ll be glad to know that AMD is once again supporting backwards compatibility, as those with an AMD 500 motherboard just need to update the BIOS to pop a new Ryzen 5000 chip in.
As we mentioned earlier, all of these CPUs are due out on November 5, and anyone who purchases between now and the end of the year can grab a complimentary copy of Far Cry 6 – although it is just the Standard Edition, so don’t get your hopes up for any fancy Deluxe versions.
