AMD Ryzen 5 1600 Review leaked: Core i7-7700K level of performance, but falls short in Gaming

The AMD Ryzen 5 1600 review has leaked out before the embargo lifts, on April 11. The review, posted by ElChapuzasInformatico, shows an impressive multithreaded performance, but once again the Ryzen chip lags a little behind Intel when it comes to gaming.

AMD is set to launch their Ryzen 5 processor family next week, which includes both hexa-core and quad-core parts. The Ryzen 5 1600 is a $219 chip featuring six cores and 12 threads which run at 3.2GHz base and 3.6GHz boost clocks. It packs 16MB of L3 cache while the TDP is maintained 95W.

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The 1600 was tested on a high-end MSI X370 XPOWER Gaming Titanium board with the G.Skill Trident Z 32GB memory clocked at 2400MHz. On graphics side, an MSI GeForce GTX 1070 Gaming Z was used as part of the test bench.

AMD Ryzen 5 1600 Synthetic Benchmarks

In single core performance tests, the Ryzen 5 1600 is on par with Ryzen 7 1700X, but its slower than the Core i5 unlocked parts.

As for multithreaded benchmarks, the 1600 manages to surpass the Core i7 7700K in both Cinebench R15 and CPU-Z, while it comes close to the latter in the WPrime 32M benchmark. This is pretty impressive considering it costs $150 less than the Kaby Lake flagship.

AMD Ryzen 5 1600 Gaming Benchmarks

Let’s move to gaming benchmarks. In synthetic 3DMark and Unigine tests, the Ryzen 5 1600 performs at the same level as the Ryzen 7 1700X and Intel’s Core i7 6700K Skylake.

At 1080p gaming, the Ryzen 5 1600 is faster than the 8-core part, but lags behind the Core i7 6700K. The performance difference is little at 4K, but the 6700K still manages to outperform the Ryzen 5, although it costs a bit extra.

In terms of power consumption, the Ryzen 5 chip performs well, rated at around 140W in the AIDA64 stress test and 245W at peak gaming load. Under the same conditions, power consumption of Intel’s Core i7 6700K was around 250W.

When it comes to memory performance, the Ryzen processors are still suffering from support issues. The Ryzen 5 1600 only supports max 2400 MHz speeds on a 3600 MHz memory kit, leading to latency problem on the AM4 boards.

AMD is already aware of this issue and will send updates to motherboard partners in May. The updates would enable AM4 motherboards “to support speeds higher than the current DDR4-3200 limit without refclk [reference clock] adjustments,” explained AMD’s Robert Hallock in last month.

The AMD Ryzen 5 1600 is designed to offer a disruptive value proposition in the mainstream gaming market. We will bring you more details on performance of the chip and others in the Ryzen 5 lineup once they launch on April 11.

DON’T MISS: Intel’s Core i7 7740K struggles against Ryzen 5 1600 in SiSoft benchmark