Adobe Premiere CC, Excel, Power Consumption
Encoding our 4K content with Premiere saw both processors deliver the same performance out of the box. Feeding the Core i5-8400 more bandwidth reduced the encode time by 5% which isn't bad but we saw a 16% reduction in encode time by overclocking Ryzen. This meant best case scenario for Intel sees them still 13% slower in this test.
However when it comes to editing as I noted earlier when looking at the PCMark results, the performance is more competitive. Generally these editing tasks don't fully utilize the thread heavy Ryzen processors and we see exactly that when using the Warp Stabilizer effect in Premiere. Still with performance from both CPUs maximised we do get a similar result.
If you love your Excel spreadsheets like Tim and myself done, then Ryzen's going to impress. The complex Monte Carlo simulation completed 23% faster with Ryzen, though admittedly it's rare that you'll do too many Excel jobs that take either CPUs more than a few seconds to complete.
Next up we have the 7-zip test and here the stock R5 1600 was 15% faster than the 8400 when carrying out compression work but a massive 40% faster for decompression. Pairing the 8400 with higher speed memory only improved its performance in this test by about 2%. Overclocking the Ryzen processor increased performance by a further 8 - 15% giving it a significant advantage over the Core i5-8400 in this workload.
Before moving onto the gaming benchmarks, here's a quick look at power consumption.The MSI B360M PRO-VD is very fuel efficient and it allows total system consumption to drop under 100 watts for this heavy workload which is impressive. Moving to the MSI Z370 PC Pro with the faster DDR4 memory increased power draw by 24%, but it only reduced the render time by a mere 2%.
Meanwhile the Ryzen 5 1600 was a lot more power hungry but keep in mind Blender does fully utilize all 12 threads so a 65% jump up from the stock 8400 isn't that bad given it has 100% more threads. When compared to the Z370 configuration the margin is significantly reduced as well, for this comparison the Ryzen CPU was 32% more power hungry.
As I said in my initial B360 coverage, these stripped down motherboards really help to improve the performance per watt of the Coffee Lake CPUs. Overclocked the R5 1600 consumed a little over 70% more power than the 8400 on the Z370 motherboard and that sounds like a lot and well it is. However keep in mind this is total system consumption and all 12-threads are under heavy load, so the fact that the systems drawing just 200 watts from the wall isn't exactly extreme.