Encoding and Rendering Performance

Our HandBrake workload doesn't agree with Ryzen and even the Core i5-7600K beats the Ryzen 5 1500X, which explains why the Core i5-8400 is able to match the R5 1600. It was also only 15% faster than the 7600K and the reason for that being that the older Kaby Lake part operates at higher frequencies.

Content creators might be interested in what the Core i5-8400 has to offer. Test with Premiere Pro CC showed the Intel 6-core CPU to be 9% faster than AMD's Ryzen 5 1600 in this application. Of course you can overclock the Ryzen 5 processor and that will no doubt put it ahead, but still an impressive out of the box result for Intel.

The Ryzen Graphic 27 workload shows the Core i5-8400 only trailing the Ryzen 5 1600 processor by a slim margin in Blender while it was significantly faster than the R5 1500X and i5-7600K.

The more extreme Gooseberry workload actually sees the Core i5-8400 perform much closer to the R5 1500X than the R5 1600. Although it was an impressive 21% faster than the i5-7600K, it was also 24% slower than the R5 1600.

Next up we have the Corona benchmark and here the Core i5-8400 wasn't much faster than the Ryzen 5 1500X, completing the workload 6% faster. It was however 42% faster than the 7600K, so that's an impressive step forward.

The final application benchmark looks at performance using POVRay and here the Core i5-8400 finds itself situated between the Ryzen 5 1600 and 1500X, as well as last generation's Core i7-7700K and i5-7600K.