AMD Ryzen 5 1600X Review, the new king of mid-range?

AMD has quite a bit of momentum from the launch of the original Ryzen CPUs. The new Zen core is a very hot topic among nearly everyone interested in tech. It’s proven to be a fascinating new addition to their portfolio. Indeed, AMD has, for the most part, met all of the performance goals for their new consumer CPU, though not without controversy.

Though the CCX design paradigm is very similar to their modular approach of the heavy equipment series, sparking much debate about the relative inefficiencies of the core design itself. Nitpicking aside, it performs fairly well in quite a few workloads.

Now they’ve gone and released their mid-range solution, the Ryzen 5 series consisting of the 1600X and the 1400, 1500 and 1500X. These utilize a 3×3 and 2×2 core arrangement respectively. Those configurations may very well have some performance inconsistencies due to how the CCX’s communicate to each other, though in reality it shouldn’t affect too many real programs or applications. Nitpicking aside, it’s real effect is negligible. Of course we can specific scenarios that show that slight weakness, but what does that accomplish? And what developer in their right mind would create something so unoptimized?

Ryzen 5 1600X could be the value sweet spot

That is, 12 threads can be for significantly less than the competition. And those 12-threads scale very well in most circumstances. Even more, there seems to be some strange issue where the 1600X is actually faster than the 1800X in some gaming scenarios. What does this mean? That for the $249 asking price, you could have a gaming PC that’s also capable of doing much more. Ryzen is not just for the most ultimate in performance in games, but in what other types of activities it can enable you to do. It’s very true that the twelve threads available are much faster at multi-threaded applications that can actually utilize them, though at times games might lack just a bit. But, this enables background tasks at a price point that is nearly unbeatable.

The Ryzen platform is a rather nice one, competing on the value front with a wealth of connectivity despite the lower costs compared to Intel’s choices. The B350 maintains the ability to overclock though comes with slightly less PCIe lanes and lacks the ability to have SLI. In addition, you have less SATA ports and fewer USB 3.0 ports. The full setup is still immensely useful in the real-world and doesn’t precisely lack for anything. The newest BIOS from ASUS is quite stable and includes the newest AGESA, version 1.0.0.4, which brings about a slight performance increase. Unfortunately the temperature offset due to the placement of the temperature sensor is still an issue. That means that the reported temperature will be higher, even past the thermal limit, even though it’s actually cooler. The SenseMI inside keeps track of actual temperature, so there will be no throttling even if you see that it’s past the 60-degree celsius maximum on whatever utility you’re using.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Testing Setup

AMD Ryzen 5 Test Bed

For this we’ve received RAM capable of 3200MHz, and of which we were able to successfully run at the maximum speed. But for the sake of consistency we’ve kept the clock speed and timings very similar to our testing of the Ryzen 7 1800X. Thankfully the board is capable of achieving the