Introduction

AMD today announced the Ryzen 5000-series “Zen 3” desktop processors, and we have with us the Ryzen 7 5800X 8-core processor in this review. The company skipped over the “4000”-series model numbering probably because the numbers were cluttered by the “Renoir” APU silicon. With today’s announcement, AMD keeps its promise of releasing a new generation of “Zen” CPU microarchitecture each year since its 2017 debut, and with each new generation they introduced IPC increments. IPC, or instructions per clock, is a de-facto way of measuring the single-threaded performance of a processor, and has a direct impact on gaming performance.

With “Zen 3,” AMD is claiming an astounding 19% IPC increase over “Zen 2,” in contrast to Intel’s zero IPC gains in the desktop segment over the past half decade or so. Riding on the backs of these 19% IPC improvements is AMD’s claim to have beaten Intel at gaming performance, given that the Ryzen 3000 “Zen 2” wasn’t too far behind Intel’s 10th Gen Core “Comet Lake” at gaming. With productivity tasks, AMD’s higher core counts for the Ryzen 9 series will give it the edge by virtue of higher core counts, 12-core and 16-core, but the game is evenly balanced when it comes to the Ryzen 7 5800X, compared to its Intel rival, the Core i7-10700K, since both are 8-core/16-thread.

Much like the Core i7-10700K, the Ryzen 7 5800X in this review is a “monolithic” 8-core processor, in that all its 8 cores not just sit on the same silicon, the “Zen 3” CCD, but also share a common L3 cache. AMD’s Ryzen 5000 processors still implement a multi-chip module, with this generation’s MCM being codenamed “Vermeer.” The doing away of 4-core CCX complexes to unify cores on the CCD should pay dividends in the form of reduced inter-core latencies, and an effectively double L3 cache size that each core can address.

AMD is announcing the Ryzen 7 5800 “Zen 3” 8-core processor at $449, which is a major step up from the $399 that its predecessor, the 3800X launched at. The 5800X is being offered as a premium gaming desktop chip for gameplay at any resolution. The chip retains a modern PCI-Express 4.0 bus for next-gen graphics cards. What’s even more interesting is that despite the IPC and clock-speed gains, the Ryzen 7 5800X is being launched with the same 105 W TDP rating as its predecessor, and on the same 7 nm silicon fabrication node. In this review, we take the processor for a spin. We’re especially looking forward to test AMD’s gaming performance claims.