On Thursday, AMD will make its biggest launch this year: the Ryzen 5000 processors for desktops, based on the all-new Zen 3 architecture. We started working with all four new CPUs: the Ryzen 5 5600 X, Ryzen 7 5800 X, Ryzen 9 5900 X and of course top model Ryzen 9 5950 X. In this review you can read whether AMD can deliver on its impressive promises.

Ryzen 5000 must also convince the die-hard gamer The official slogan of the Ryzen 5000 generation is ‘the fastest in the game’. With this pun, AMD is clearly flirting with gamers, who are undeniably a large part of the desktop CPU target audience. In fact, according to market researchers, gamers are responsible for the desktop market remaining the only growth bastion in the shrinking PC market in recent years, although covid – 19 has also of course everything changed in that area.

Although there was a certain consensus that the Ryzen 3000 processors offered the better overall picture, Intel knew Maintain the gaming performance crown over the past year, for example by significantly increasing the clock frequencies. In addition, Intel’s monolithic architecture had an advantage when it came to latency-sensitive workloads, and gaming is an excellent example of this.

Fast CPUs for high frame rates You may have felt the urge to dive into the comments while reading the previous paragraph and argue that the processor isn’t the bottleneck when gaming at a decent resolution. That’s true, but somewhat bluntly. On the one hand, we see monitors with high refresh rates taking flight and gradually even on TVs 120 Hz is becoming the standard. A sufficiently fast processor is required to allow very high frame rates. On the other hand, you should realize that if you upgrade to a faster video card in the future, gaming performance will scale, even AMD emphasizes. A processor that now fares better in CPU – bottlenecked gaming scenarios, will give you more breathing room in the future.

That AMD now itself comes up with arguments that have so far been primarily used against the Ryzen CPUs, but indicates that the manufacturer has every confidence: the Ryzen 5000 processors must also games run around the competition. We will find out in this extensive review whether the CPU designer actually lives up to that claim.