Page 1: The king is defeated: AMD Ryzen 9 5900 X and Ryzen 5 5600 X under test

Since today the first offshoots of the new Ryzen are – 5000 – family available. With them, AMD wants to bring down the last Intel bastion and finally play a leading role again in gaming performance, after the competitor with its Matisse offshoots had already been put on the skin in terms of price and multicore performance, and even against them forced a counterattack. Today’s test article on the following pages should clarify whether AMD will finally succeed in the final change in leadership. We have the AMD Ryzen 9 5900 X and Ryzen 5 5800 X put to the test in time for the NDA case.

In July 2019 blew AMD into a major attack and sent its first processors based on the Zen-2 architecture into the race. After Zen 1 and Zen +, which both created the basis with constant improvements over the years, they should finally be a high-performance and above all competitive alternative to Intel again. In fact, the Matisse processors like the AMD Ryzen 9 3950 X, Ryzen 9 3900 X and Ryzen 5 3600 X and the smaller Ryzen 3 models draw level after years of drought – In terms of price and multicore performance, the AM4 CPUs had up to 16 Cores even after the Intel counterattack in the form of the Core i9 – 10900 K ahead. Only in terms of gaming performance did the AMD models have to cut back and let the competition pass. Now the last Intel bastion should finally fall.

With its first models of the new Ryzen available today – 5000 – Family AMD wants to finally put its archenemy to flight and also to be number one of the fastest among players Processors are. That this should finally succeed is already clear from the name, because AMD skips the Ryzen on the desktop – 4000 – Family, which was actually planned next. There are only a few Renoir notebooks. The flagship model among the AM4 processors is changing from the Ryzen 9 3950 X for Ryzen 9 5950 X.

During the first public announcement, AMD spoke of a performance gain of around 9 and 39%, with an average of about 19% should be. For this purpose, its Zen architecture has been further developed and some changes have been made, especially on the front end and the caches, but also on the back end, which should enable the significant increase in performance. Since from now on there is double the number of cores in a CCX and thus communication via the external I / O die is partially eliminated, the latency times in communication with one another should be significantly reduced, which should benefit games and single-core applications in particular. In addition, the L3 cache is merged, which is also intended to reduce latencies due to the rarer mutual accesses.

On paper, however, the differences are much smaller: Even AMD’s Ryzen 5000 supports like its predecessor DDR4 – 3200 in the dual channel Operation, has 24 PCIe Gen4 Lans with a TDP of up to 105 W and will still produced in the 7 nm process. Depending on the model, Vermeer also has six to 16 cores, whereby the smaller quad-core versions of the Ryzen 3 family are not likely to follow until the next few weeks. In terms of clock speed, the boost is only slightly up in the generation comparison, whereby AMD expects a higher performance per clock due to numerous optimizations.

Four models for the release, two for the test

The new Ryzen processors in the overview

	Cores / Threads	Basis / Boost	L3 cache	L2 cache	TDP	Price
Ryzen 9 5950 X	16 / 32	3.4 / 4.9 GHz	64 MB	8 MB	105 W	799 Euro
Ryzen 9 3950 X	16 / 32	3.5 / 4.7 GHz	64 MB	8 MB	105 W	approximately 669 Euro
Ryzen 9 5900 X
12 / 24	3.7 / 4.8 GHz	64 MB	6 MB	105 W	549 Euro
Ryzen 9 3900 XT	12 / 24	3.8 / 4.7 GHz	64 MB	6 MB	105 W	about 429 Euro
Ryzen 9 3900 X	12 / 24	3.8 / 4.6 GHz	64 MB	6 MB	105 W	approximately 399 Euro
Ryzen 7 5800 X	8th / 16	3.8 / 4.7 GHz	32 MB	4 MB	105 W	449 Euro
Ryzen 7 3800 XT	8th / 16	3.9 / 4.7 GHz	32 MB	4 MB	105 W	about 309 Euro
Ryzen 7 3800 X	8th / 16	3.9 / 4.5 GHz	32 MB	4 MB	105 W	approximately 299 Euro
Ryzen 7 3700 X	8 / 16	3.6 / 4.4 GHz	32 MB	4 MB	65 W	approximately 279 Euro
Ryzen 5 5600 X	6 / 12	3.7 / 4.6 GHz	32 MB	3 MB	65 W	299 Euro
Ryzen 5 3600 XT	6 / 12	3.8 / 4.5 GHz	32 MB	3 MB	95 W
approximately 179 Euro
Ryzen 5 3600 X	6 / 12	3.8 / 4.4 GHz	32 MB	3 MB	95 W	about 199 Euro
Ryzen 5 3600	6 / 12	3.6 / 4.2 GHz	32 MB	3 MB	65 W	approximately 179 Euro

At the start of Ryzen 5000 there are initially four different models. The AMD Ryzen 9 5950 X leads with his 16 Cores and 32 Threads the field in the future and makes itself with a TDP of 105 W to work with a base and boost clock of 3.4 to 4.9 GHz. With the next smaller model, the Ryzen 9 5900 X, the number of cores drops to twelve, while the clock rates drop to 3.7 to 4.8 GHz. Due to the lower number of cores, the L2 cache is also reduced from 8 to 6 MB, but the cache in the third row remains with 64 MB exist, just like the TDP of 105 W. The AMD Ryzen 7 5800 X offers eight cores and 16 Threads that get to work at 3.8 to 4.7 GHz. A decrease in the TDP only brings the AMD Ryzen 5 5000 X on 65 W with itself. It only has six cores and twelve threads with clock rates of 3.7 to 4.6 GHz.

Depending on the model, between 299 and 799 euros, whereby AMD is based on the release prices of the predecessor. For the time being, the new Vermeer models run on the X 550 – and B 550 – Mainboards , in the next year selected X 470 – and B 450 boards can be made fit via BIOS update. Occasionally, however, the manufacturers have already released corresponding beta versions.

For our launch test we have the AMD Ryzen 9 5900 X and the AMD Ryzen 5 5600 X with twelve and six Get cores. The top model and the medium offshoot should reach us during the day, so we will soon have all four newcomers in the test. The key data of both models can be found in the corresponding CPUz screenshots:

We have the AMD Ryzen 9 5900 X and the AMD Ryzen 5 5600 X put to the test. How AMD’s latest processor generation fares in terms of game performance, power consumption, overclocking behavior and other applications can be found in this Hardware Luxx test on the following pages.

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The Zen 3 architecture