Synthetic & Application Performance
Using Cinebench R15 to measure single and multi-threaded performance we once again find extremely impressive figures from the Ryzen CPUs. The 1600X lays waste to the 7600K's multi-threaded score, essentially doubling it. That said, for single-threaded workloads, the higher memory clock speed of the Core i5 results in the 1600X being 11% slower here.
Moving to the 1500X, we find it's just 15% slower than the 7700K in the multi-threaded test and 21% slower when looking at single-thread performance. However, when compared to the similarly priced 7600, the 1600X offered 45% faster multi-threaded performance and 6% faster when looking at single-thread.
As we found when testing Ryzen 7, this points to Ryzen 5 offering vastly superior productivity performance compared to competing Intel CPUs.
The 7-Zip benchmark shows similar margins to what we just saw in Cinebench R15, though this is a real-world application and the gains here can actually be enjoyed by the average user. There are two tests here: one measures the performance when compressing files to an archive and another measures performance when extracting an archive.
It's interesting to note that Intel's compression and decompression performance is similar. The AMD CPUs are much faster at decompression than they are compression, though to be fair they are anything but slow at either.
In fact, the 1600X crushes the 7700K in both tests, being 15% faster when compressing and 44% faster when decompressing. When compared to the 7600K, the 1600X is more than twice as fast when decompressing.
Meanwhile, the 1500X is over 60% faster than the 7500 in our decompression test, which is a massive difference and the vast majority of users will open archives more commonly than they will compress them so this is a big win for Ryzen.
The Monte Carlo simulation is an old favorite and this heavy Excel workload crushes weak CPUs. It's also a great test for measuring multi-threaded performance as it uses all available threads. We've seen it do a good job of utilizing a dual-Xeon configuration with 40-threads.
I realize most of you are more interested in gaming performance than heavy spreadsheet work but this is a good indicator of real-world performance in applications that utilize multiple threads.
Here we see that the 1600X is 10% faster than the 7700K and 62% faster than the 7600K, while the 1500X was 20% slower than the 7700K but 18% faster than the 7600K and 61% faster than the 7500. So when compared to similarly priced Intel CPUs, Ryzen 5 delivers around 60% more performance in this application.
Before jumping to the game benches, let's check out the performance results from Premiere Pro CC. This is a different workload from our previous Premiere tests. It's still a 4K video export, but we reduced the video length to speed up the test.
The 1600X took 241 seconds to complete the workload, which was 31% faster than the Core i5-7600K, while the 1500X managed to match the 7600K and overtake the 7500 by 22% – another excellent application result for AMD.