Tom’s Hardware has tested dozens of processors to find the best CPU for gaming. Our list of 2026 CPU gaming benchmarks currently comprises 17 of the most demanding titles available on the market, which we run each gaming processor through to see the chips that come out on top. We select our picks based on the data in our CPU benchmark hierarchy, so all of the CPUs below are backed by hundreds of hours of real-world, hands-on testing where we gather extensive data on how a CPU performs and behaves while gaming. If you want a broader look at the CPU market, our AMD vs. Intel article shows you where the current CPU duopoly stands, while our CPU buying guide can help you narrow down the best processor for you.

Now in the back half of the year, we don’t expect major new releases from AMD or Intel. AMD has been on a tear with refreshes, particularly among X3D CPUs. We recently reviewed the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition, AMD’s first CPU with 3D V-Cache on both CCDs, and it’s the most powerful chip from Team Red currently available. It’s earned a spot on this list, though the (much cheaper) Ryzen 9 9950X3D isn’t far behind in overall performance.

We’ve also seen the Ryzen 7 9850X3D, which is technically the fastest gaming processor on the market, as you can see in our Ryzen 7 9850X3D review. However, we’ve kept the base Ryzen 7 9800X3D as our top recommendation for the best CPU for gaming due to its price. It’s only marginally behind the refreshed model (about 3% on average), and much cheaper. For most gamers, the Ryzen 7 9800X3D makes more sense.

Intel has seen a recent boost in gaming performance with Arrow Lake Refresh, and both the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus and Core Ultra 7 270K Plus have earned spots on our list. AMD dominates in gaming at the moment, however. Our sights are set on Intel’s next-gen Nova Lake chips for a big gaming boost from Team Blue, as well as the rumored ‘Raptor Lake Next’ lineup that’s supposedly arriving early next year.

For the rest of the year, we have the Ryzen 7 7700X3D and Ryzen 7 5800X3D 10th Anniversary Edition to look forward to, which are arriving in July and June, respectively. We don’t anticipate they’ll make a major impact on our rankings here, but we plan on reviewing both CPUs as soon as they’re available.

In addition to the fastest CPUs from AMD and Intel, we’ve included a few DDR4 options on this list. The price of DRAM and NAND flash has made building even a budget PC prohibitively expensive, so DDR4 platforms are a great way to save money. Vendors are signaling a shift back toward DDR4 platforms at the moment, so we may reconsider some older CPUs for our rankings as pricing and availability allows.

Here are the gaming CPUs we recommend buying. We have a shortlist of the top options and some alternatives below, but you can click the ‘More’ links to read our thoughts about a particular CPU and where it stands in the current market.

Prime Day Exceptional CPU deal

Here is a standout budget CPU deal from the Prime Day event, which is currently taking place. See our best overall picks below.

Best CPU for Gaming in 2026 at a glance (more info below):

The list below is for the best CPUs for gaming, while the best budget CPUs can help you find a cheap chip. Processors benefit from the best thermal paste, so check out our guide if you're shopping for a new processor. But if you're after the best CPU for gaming, you're in the right place.

Best CPU for Gaming Benchmarks

We rank all the Intel and AMD processors based on our in-depth CPU benchmarks hierarchy. You can see some of those numbers in the charts above, including CPU overclock performance results (marked as PBO for AMD processors). We're currently retesting all of these processors with the Nvidia RTX 5090, but only the first four slides have that testing. The remainder are historical testing results with the RTX 4090, which we'll remove once we have fully retested all of the gaming CPUs with the RTX 5090 for our benchmarks. This group of results comprises only the chips that have passed through our newest test suite. Additionally, the tables in our CPU benchmark hierarchy include rankings based on past CPU benchmarks and breakdowns of single- and multi-threaded performance in productivity applications across a broad spate of processors. Finally, be aware that the pricing in the charts above can fluctuate.

Quick Shopping Tips

When choosing the best CPU for gaming in 2026, consider the following:

• You can't lose with AMD or Intel: As noted in our AMD vs. Intel feature, AMD tends to make the best all-around CPU for gaming for mainstream PCs lately, but both offer compelling performance options at any given price point.
• Eight cores is sufficient for gaming: If you’re looking at a pricey flagship, you’re likely wasting some money if gaming is your primary focus. You can game on as little as a quad-core CPU, but performance scaling really falls off past eight cores.
• Budget platform costs: You never want to pair a strong CPU with a weak GPU, RAM, and storage. Right now, it’s especially important to consider platform costs, however. DDR5 prices are peaking, and you’ll need to factor in the cost of DDR5 and a new motherboard if you’re coming from an older socket like AM4.
• Overclocking isn’t for everyone, but if you follow our How to Overclock a CPU guide, you can scrape out extra performance gains.

Best CPU for Gaming 2026 - $300 to $400

The Ryzen 7 9800X3D technically isn’t the fastest gaming chip on the market any more. That title goes to the new Ryzen 7 9850X3D, though the victory is marginal. As you can read in our Ryzen 7 9850X3D review, AMD’s latest X3D offering pushes ahead by 3.3% on average. Despite a minor uplift, we’re still recommending the Ryzen 7 9800X3D. With prices as they currently are, the Ryzen 7 9850X3D is only 3.3% faster despite costing around 6% more than the Ryzen 7 9800X3D.

This chip really has no peer in the market outside of the Ryzen 7 9850X3D — the Ryzen 7 9800X3D delivers outstanding gaming performance, beating Intel's fastest gaming chip, the $469 Core i9-14900K, by 30% in our test suite. The 9800X3D is also almost unbelievably 35% faster than the current-gen Intel flagship, the $560 Core Ultra 9 285K. The stock Ryzen 7 9800X3D's 1% low frame rates (a good smoothness indicator) also deliver an exceptionally smooth gaming experience, benefiting gamers even in GPU-limited scenarios.

The Ryzen 7 9800X3D has eight cores and 16 threads that operate at a 4.7 GHz base and 5.2 GHz boost clock rate. The chip employs AMD's 3D V-Cache tech with a new spin, which places a 3D-stacked SRAM chiplet underneath the die to deliver an incredible 96MB of L3 cache to great effect. AMD moved the L3 cache chiplet from the top to the bottom of the compute die this generation. That gives the integrated heat spreader (IHS) direct access to the compute die, allowing for more thermal headroom, and in turn, higher clock speeds. The end result is a comparatively low-power chip that delivers incredible gaming performance and comparable productivity performance to other eight-core models on the market.

3D V-Cache previously came with trade-offs in the productivity department, but that’s not the case with the Ryzen 7 9800X3D. Still, 3D V-Cache doesn’t provide a performance benefit in every game, and the performance benefit is less pronounced as your display resolution climbs.

The Ryzen 7 9800X3D has much lower power consumption than the Intel competition, making it a far cooler processor that won't require as expensive accommodations, like a beefy cooler, motherboard, and power supply. It also takes particularly well to undervolting, which is easy to accomplish with AMD’s Curve Optimizer. That means the 9800X3D delivers top-notch gaming performance and a cooler, quieter, and less expensive system than you'll get with an Ultra 9 or Core i9.

Read: AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D Review

The $305 Ryzen 7 9700X had a rough initial product launch, but AMD's targeted firmware and operating system improvements have changed the picture tremendously, allowing the chip to place much higher on our CPU benchmark hierarchy (head there for the most up-to-date gaming benchmarks). Combined with lower-than-launch pricing, the Ryzen 7 9700X is a strong contender, tying Intel's Core i9-14900K in gaming and beating the Core i7-14700K. That's not to mention that it beats Intel's entire lineup of Arrow Lake processors as well. Now, all of those processors offer faster performance in heavily-threaded productivity applications than the 9700X, but when it comes to a pure gaming experience, the 9700X either ties or beats all current Intel competitors.

The Ryzen 7 9700X has eight Zen 5 cores with 16 threads that operate at a 3.8 GHz base and 5.5 GHz boost clock. The chip has a 65W TDP, though AMD retroactively added a 105W TDP option you can select in the BIOS that helps boost performance in productivity applications. It's covered by the warranty, as well. With either setting, the 9700X has comparatively tame power consumption, so it is an easy chip to cool. You'll have to buy your own cooler for the processor, though.

The Ryzen 7 9700X drops into socket AM5 motherboards, and B-series motherboards make the most sense for this class of chip. B850 and B840 motherboards get AMD's latest chipset with features like mandatory PCIe 5.0 support on the top M.2 slot and better availability for features like Wi-Fi 7. However, the Ryzen 7 9700X will still work with the older B650 chipset if you can find a board on sale.

Read: Ryzen 5 9700X Review

The $350 Core Ultra 7 270K Plus performs like a flagship CPU, but it costs about half as much. In games, it narrowly outclasses the Core i7-14700K and offers a 2.4% boost over the competing Ryzen 7 9700X. AMD’s last-gen Ryzen 7 7800X3D still offers around a 10% boost over the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus, but it’s also around $50 to $80 more expensive depending on sales.

It’s a solid gaming CPU, and certainly a better recommendation than the Core i7-14700K given prices right now. Compared to the Ryzen 7 9700X, things are tighter. The Core Ultra 7 270K Plus gains an edge with productivity performance. Short of the 9950X, it’s at the top of our multithreaded performance rankings, more than doubling the performance of the Ryzen 7 9700X.

On the gaming front, it supports Intel’s new Binary Optimization Tool, which offers an average of an 8% improvement in gaming performance based on our testing. It’s only available in a limited number of games at the moment, but Intel says it plans to support the feature with updates in the future.

For specs, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus is close to the 285K. It comes with 24 cores and threads, split across eight Lion Cove P-cores and 16 Darkmont E-cores. The P-cores boost up to 5.4 GHz and the E-cores can climb to 4.7 GHz. Across the CPU, you get a total of 76 MB of combined L2 and L3 cache. It comes with a 125W TDP and 250W MTP. Critically, the Core Ultra 270K Plus also comes with a 900 MHz boost in die-to-die frequency and 400 MHz boost in fabric frequency compared to stock Arrow Lake chips.

The Core Ultra 7 270K Plus slots into existing 800-series motherboards with the LGA 1851 socket. This is an unlocked chip, so if you want to get the full benefits of overclocking, you’ll need a Z890 board. However, it’ll still work with H- and B-series motherboards, just without CPU overclocking support.

Read: Core Ultra 7 270K Plus Review

Mid-Range Best CPU for Gaming - $200 to $300

Intel has returned to gaming prominence with its Arrow Lake Refresh CPUs, and nowhere is that clearer than with the $220 Core Ultra 5 250K Plus. It’s priced like a budget CPU at $220, but it can perform as well (and sometimes even better) than chips that cost twice as much. It doesn’t dominate the gaming charts in the same way as AMD’s X3D offerings, but at this price, it doesn’t need to. It offers marginally better performance than AMD’s competing six-core Ryzen 5 9600X in games while running the tables with application performance.

On average, the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus is 1% faster than the Ryzen 5 9600X at 1080p, and 9% faster than the 245K. It’s functionally identical, but Intel’s new iBOT feature allows the chip to hold some solid leads in certain titles. For instance, it’s 10% ahead of the 9600X in Cyberpunk 2077. Even in a non-iBOT title like Doom: The Dark Ages, the 250K Plus leads by 12%. There are still some games that struggle with the unique Arrow Lake architecture like F1 2024, but the losses are less pronounced with the souped-up Arrow Lake Refresh chips compared to the stock offerings.

The application performance is what really stands out with the 250K Plus, however. With 18 cores, it outpaces the Core i7-13700K, nearly matches the Core i7-14700K, and more than doubles the performance of the Ryzen 5 9600X in multithreaded applications. In single-threaded applications, it beats the Ryzen 5 9600X by 6%.

Although you get 18 cores, they’re split between six Lion Cove performance cores and 12 Darkmont efficient cores. The P-cores climb up to 5.3 GHz, while the E-cores top out at 4.6 GHz. The CPU comes with a combined 60 MB of L2 and L3 cache, along with a TDP of 125W and a MTP of 159W. Like all Arrow Lake chips, it doesn’t support Hyper-Threading, so you get 18 total threads.

The Core Ultra 5 250K Plus slots into existing motherboards with the LGA 1851 socket. It’s unlocked for overclocking, so a Z-series motherboard is an ideal pairing. However, Intel increased the die-to-die frequency and the fabric frequency out of the box, and you’ll see those improvements in action on B- and H-series motherboards, as well. It’s locked to DDR5 memory, unlike Raptor Lake and Alder Lake platforms, and it officially supports speeds up to 7200MT/s.

Read: Core Ultra 5 250K Plus Review

The $230 Ryzen 5 7600X3D is currently the best value gaming CPU you can get right now, though it trades performance in other areas to reach that status. It's just 4.5% slower than the Ryzen 7 7800X3D based on our testing, giving you most of the performance of AMD's coveted 3D V-Cache in games without the extra cost.

In games, it outclasses more expensive CPUs with ease, including the Ryzen 7 9700X, and averaged just 65W of power draw during our gaming tests. Outside of games, however, the Ryzen 5 7600 X3D struggles. The Core Ultra 5 250K Plus is more than twice as fast in multithreaded performance, and in single-threaded performance, even the base Ryzen 5 7600X is around 13% faster.

The lagging productivity performance makes sense. The Ryzen 5 7600X3D is a six-core / 12-thread chip, so it has limited multithreaded potential, and it only clocks up to 4.7 GHz. The limited specs give AMD room to cram 102 MB of combined L2/L3 cache on the die, however, which comes with a sizeable boost in gaming performance. Compared to the base Ryzen 5 7600X, the X3D version is 22% faster despite coming in at lower peak clocks and power draw.

You can slot the Ryzen 5 7600X3D into socket AM5, which is available on 600- and 800-series motherboards, though the latter may require a BIOS update. Memory and CPU overclocking is available on both B- and X-series chipsets; however, the Ryzen 5 7600X3D has a locked multiplier, so the only overclocking you can access is through AMD's Precision Boost Overdrive, or PBO.

Read: Ryzen 5 7600X3D review

Highest Performance Best CPU for Gaming - $400+

How do you improve upon a CPU that already claims a dominating position in gaming and productivity workloads? You add more cache, of course. The Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 is powerful, expensive, and hungry for wattage, but it’s the best of the best if you want top-shelf gaming and application performance. It throws value out the window, and it’s only marginally better than the Ryzen 9 9950X3D, but it is still better.

Based on our testing, it’s about 3.9% ahead of the Ryzen 9 9950X3D in multithreaded applications, and in lockstep in gaming at 1080p. Compared to Intel’s Core Ultra 7 270K Plus, the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 is 9% ahead in multithreaded performance and 23% ahead in average gaming performance. The Ryzen 7 9800X3D delivers a better value on the gaming front, and the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus is a monster productivity chip at a third of the price of the 9950X3D2. But the magic trick of this chip is that it can do both without breaking a sweat.

Under the hood, the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 is similar to the Ryzen 9 9950X3D. It’s a 16-core / 32-thread chip packing AMD’s Zen 5 architecture, and it tops out with a 5.6 GHz boost clock; just 100MHz behind the 9950X3D. As the name suggests, this processor is unique because it uses AMD’s 3D V-Cache on both CCDs. Both eight-core CCDs have 32 MB of onboard cache, plus an additional 64 MB chunk placed under the cores, giving you a total of 192 MB of L3 cache.

The extra cache slightly accelerates multithreaded performance overall, though only by around 4%. There are specific workloads where the advantage is more present, with some data science workloads showing performance gains in the realm of 26% over the Ryzen 9 9950X3D. Those specific workstation-class workloads are where the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 earns its stripes.

Otherwise, it’s the chip to buy because you simply want the best, no matter what the cost or how marginal the improvements are. It slots into existing AM5 motherboards, and it’s best suited for newer 800-series chipsets. AMD officially supports memory speeds up to DDR5-5600, though we find that DDR5-6000 is the sweet spot for Zen 5 CPUs.

Prices have dropped since release, though the 9950X3D2 is still expensive. It launched at $1,000, but you can find the chip for around $900 now.

Read: AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Review

The prior-gen $469 Core i9-14900K is now selling for all-time low pricing, primarily because the newer $560 Core Ultra 9 285K has arrived to take its place. However, the Core Ultra 9 285K is actually slower than the 14900K in gaming, so it isn't a suitable replacement. The new Core Ultra 7 270K Plus is marginally slower based on our testing, as well. Even in the face of Intel’s 200S Boost update, which was meant improve gaming performance, the competitive landscape remains unchanged. In our testing, the Core Ultra 9 285K gained an average of 7% from the update, which means it’s still slower than the Core i9-14900K.

You should be aware that the much more economically-priced 14700K (listed above) is only 2% slower than the 14900K in gaming but costs over $100 less. The Ryzen 7 9700X, also listed above, is also less expensive and effectively ties the 14900K in gaming.

However, there are Intel fans willing to pay extra for the absolute most gaming performance they can get from an Intel platform. Also, the 14900K does offer more multi-threaded horsepower than the 14700K and 9700X, which could be useful if you game, stream, and record simultaneously or do other heavy multi-tasking while gaming. Just make sure that your use case justifies the extra cost.

The 14900K sports leading-edge connectivity, supporting DDR4-3200 or up to DDR5-5600 memory, along with 16 lanes of PCIe 5.0 and an additional four lanes of PCIe 4.0 from the chip for M.2 SSDs.

The chip comes with eight P-cores that support Hyper-Threading and 16 single-threaded E-cores for a total of 32 threads. The P-cores have a 3.2 GHz base, and peak frequencies reach an amazing 6.0 GHz with Turbo Boost Max 3.0 (this feature is only active on P-cores). Meanwhile, the E-cores have a 2.4 GHz base and stretch up to 4.4 GHz via the standard Turbo Boost 2.0 algorithms. The chip also has 36MB of L3 cache and 32MB of L2.

This 14900K has a 125W PBP (base) and 253W MTP (peak) power rating, but we recorded considerably lower power consumption than its prior-gen counterpart. You'll need to buy a capable cooler for the chip, and you'll also need either a 700-series or 600-series motherboard. Like other Raptor Lake Refresh chips, you can find DDR4 and DDR5 motherboards, though you’ll need to go with a DDR5 board for the highest performance.

The lower price of DDR4 might entice some gamers, but you'll lose anywhere from 5-8% of gaming performance with higher-end Intel chips. You can step up to the much more expensive DDR5 if you need access to more memory throughput and, thus, every bit of performance possible.

Beyond specs, the Core i9-14900K was at the center of a years-long controversy concerning instability. An error in the microcode (CPU firmware) meant the Core i9-14900K would degrade faster than expected, starting with instability in games. Intel has rectified the issue with microcode 0x12F, so make sure you update your BIOS immediately if you pick up Intel’s last-gen flagship

Read: Intel Core i9-14900K Review

Best Budget CPU Pick - $100 to $150

The $164 Ryzen 5 7600X is an attractive budget CPU at its new price, forced down by Intel's new Arrow Lake Refresh chips. It’s marginally slower than the Ryzen 5 9600X, but also marginally cheaper – the Ryzen 5 7600X offers about 90% of the performance of the Ryzen 5 9600X for 94% of the price. It’s a slightly worse value, but it’s still a good option to keep in mind, especially if you find it on sale. The Ryzen 5 7600, sans X, is available at around the same price. We’ve yet to see it drop below the Ryzen 5 7600X, however.

With the 7600X, you get six cores and 12 threads based on the Zen 4 architecture, clocked at 4.7GHz with boost speeds up to 5.3GHz. Unlike the Ryzen 5 9600X, the Zen 4-based version comes with a TDP of 105W. Cooling it shouldn’t be an issue, and you’re free to run in AMD’s 65W Eco mode through the Ryzen Master software.

The Ryzen 5 7600X slots into AM5 motherboards, including 600- and 800-series chipsets, and it supports PCIe 5.0. DDR5 is required, which is a tough pill to swallow at this bang-for-your-buck price point, but it’s hard to avoid soaring RAM prices.

Read: Ryzen 5 7600X review

The $135 AMD Ryzen 5 5600 delivers a solid blend of performance in both gaming and productivity applications, bringing a new level of value to the Zen 3 lineup. If you're fine sticking with a previous-gen AM4 motherboard, the Ryzen 5 5600 makes a great base for a budget build. The primary trade-off for the AM4 platform is that you're limited to DDR4, and you don't have access to PCIe 5.0. You also have a limited runway for upgrades, as the fastest gaming CPUs on AM4 – the Ryzen 7 5700X3D and Ryzen 7 5800X3D – have reached end of life.

The Ryzen 5 5600 also makes an absolutely unbeatable budget chip if you're updating a first-gen Ryzen system. The 5600 unseats the Ryzen 5 5600X, a long-time favorite. The 5600X is only a mostly imperceptible ~1% faster in gaming and multi-threaded PC work than the non-X model, but provides a 4% advantage in single-threaded work.

Our testing shows that the Ryzen 5 5600 generally matches the gaming performance of its more expensive sibling, the ~$230 Ryzen 7 5800X. That makes the 5600 an incredibly well-rounded chip that can handle gaming well, from competitive-class performance with high refresh rate monitors to multi-tasking gaming workloads like streaming, while also serving up more than enough performance for day-to-day productivity apps. As with all AMD CPUs for gaming, you can fully overclock the chip.

The Ryzen 5 5600 has a 3.7 GHz base and 4.6 GHz boost clock. The chip also has a 65W TDP rating, so it runs cool and quiet. Existing AMD owners with a 500-series motherboard will be happy, as the 5600X drops right into existing 500-, 400-, and 300-series motherboards. If you need a new motherboard to support the chip, AMD's AM4 motherboards are plentiful and relatively affordable, with the B-series lineup offering the best overall value for this class of chip.

Prices for the Ryzen 5 5600 have drifted upward as stock depletes, but that’s offset by platform costs. In addition to low prices on AM4 motherboards, the Ryzen 5 5600 is limited to DDR4. High DDR5 prices are a significant roadblock to opting for a newer chip, as prices continue to surge. So it’s hard to recommend a newer budget CPU, even if it’ll net you higher performance. In the event you already have a kit of DDR5, the $189 Ryzen 5 7600 is a compelling option, and it includes AMD’s Wraith Stealth cooler.

Read: AMD Ryzen 5 5600 Review

Entry-Level Best CPU for Gaming - For gaming on integrated GPUs

The $268 Ryzen 7 8700G, AMD's flagship desktop APU, delivers the fastest socketed performance on the market from integrated graphics, bringing passable 1080p gaming to the desktop PC without a discrete graphics card, but its high price point relegates it to a niche audience.

In contrast, the $191 Ryzen 5 8600G delivers 90% of the 8700G's performance but for ~$80 less, making it a solid alternative for gaming systems that don't use a discrete GPU.

Naturally, you'll have to accept lower fidelity settings and be realistic about which titles can play at 1080p resolution. Still, AMD's Hyper-RX suite of features, which includes in-driver Radeon Super Resolution upscaling tech, frame generation with AMD Fluid Motion Frames (AFMF), Anti-Lag+, and Radeon Boost, helps boost performance at a slight cost to image quality. This new feature set, a first for AMD's iGPUs, is a boon for budget gamers.

The Ryzen 5 8600G has six Zen 4 CPU cores and the RDNA 3 GPU engine with eight CUs. The Ryzen 5 8600G drops into the AM5 platform, with value-focused B650 and A620 motherboards being the obvious best combination. These systems offer a new level of connectivity for AMD's APU processors, which were previously on the aging AM4 platform but require DDR5 memory. That adds some cost, so do a value analysis before selecting this processor. If you're looking for the lowest entry price possible with an APU, the Ryzen 5 5600G listed below slots in as the value alternative.

The Ryzen 7 8600G only supports 16 usable lanes of PCIe 4.0 connectivity, while other processors on the AM5 platform support PCIe 5.0. However, we don't feel this will impact this class of system.

More: AMD Ryzen 7 8700G and Ryzen 5 8600G Review

The Ryzen 5 5600G steps into the arena as the value champ for APUs, which are chips with strong enough integrated graphics that they don't require a discrete GPU for light gaming—just be sure you're willing to accept lowered quality settings.

The Ryzen 5 5600G gives you 96% of the gaming performance on integrated graphics than its more expensive sibling, the Ryzen 7 5700G, but for 25% less cash. Our testing shows that its level of performance makes it the best value APU on the market. As long as you're willing to sacrifice fidelity and resolution and keep your expectations in check, the Ryzen 5 5600G's Vega graphics have surprisingly good performance in gaming.

The 5600G's Vega graphics served up comparatively great 1280x720 gaming across numerous titles in our tests, but options become more restricted at 1080p. Of course, you can get away with 1080p gaming, but you'll need to severely limit the fidelity settings with most titles.

With eight cores and 16 threads that operate at a 3.9 GHz base and boost up to 4.4 GHz, the Ryzen 5 5600G also offers solid performance for its price point in standard desktop PC applications. The chip also comes with a bundled Wraith Stealth cooler, sweetening the value prop, and drops into existing 500-series and some 400-series motherboards, though support on the latter will vary by vendor.

The Ryzen 5 5600G is nearly five years old, and as a result, it’s hard to find it in stock at a reasonable price. AMD updated this model with the Ryzen 5 5600GT in early 2024, which features identical silicon and a slight boost to clock speed, and you’ll generally find it for less at around $150.

If your budget is tight and you're looking to build a system for modest gaming, you should check out our Best Cheap CPU feature. Some of those chips can deliver passable gaming performance without a graphics card, and their prices start at just $55 (£40).

Read: AMD Ryzen 5 5600G Review

• MORE: CPU Benchmark Hierarchy
• MORE: AMD vs Intel
• MORE: Best Cheap CPUs
• MORE: Best CPUs for Workstations

A previous Zen 3 flagship desktop CPU from AMD before the arrival of its updated big brother processor from the AMD stable, specifically the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X and 7950X3D. AMD's Zen 3-based Ryzen 9 5950X was a fantastic mix of gaming performance combined with the ability to smash through productivity tasks and multi-threaded performance duties. Holding its value pretty well, sales on the Ryzen 9 5950X haven't been that common compared to other CPUs, but that's recently changed with this CPU dropping to a new low on Amazon.

The AMD Ryzen 9 5950X processor has fallen to a new low of just $399 on Amazon, a drop of almost $50 compared to recent prices and checked against the Camelizer price comparison tool.  If you're running an AM4 system and want to upgrade your CPU to something more task-oriented than just gaming, this could be the CPU choice for you.  Or if you're able to pick up a cheap X570 motherboard for example, this could be the start of a cheaper yet still powerful work/gaming computer.

The Ryzen 9 5950X might not be topping the CPU benchmark lists anymore but it remains on a lot of them. If you take a look at our CPU hierarchy you can still see the CPU ranking highly in multi-threaded performance especially.  So it might not be the best CPU for gaming, but it is especially adept at productivity tasks due to its 16 cores and 32 threads, solid multi-threaded performance, a base clock of 3.4 GHz, and maximum boost frequency of 4.9 GHz. Surprisingly this processor has a relatively low TDP of just 105 watts despite its performance.

In an interview with Gamers Nexus, AMD’s Amit Mehra and Bill Alverson shared the origin story of AMD’s 3D-VCache technology and how the technology became present on its mainstream Ryzen consumer desktop platform — including some of the Best CPUs for Gaming. During their discussion with Gamer Nexus’ Steve Burke, the duo showed off prototypes of AMD’s first Ryzen 3D-VCache parts, including 12-core and 16-core models with dual CCD 3D-VCache designs. 

AMD’s insight highlights the fact that the company was actually looking into producing high-core count Ryzen 5000 products with 3D-VCache technology as many enthusiasts have theorized. It also confirms that AMD was not architecturally limited to building an 8-core design alone, but had the physical production capability to produce multi-CCD 12-core and 16-core Ryzen 5000X3D chips if it wanted to.

According to AMD’s Amit Mehra, the desktop implementation of AMD’s 3D-VCache technology started as an accident. The original implementation was designed for servers only, with AMD originally only testing 3D-VCache iterations of its EPYC server CPUs. 

The reason AMD opted to research 3D-Vcache functionality on Ryzen in the first place, was due to an “accident” during the production of presumably prototype Epyc 3D-VCache chips where 7 CCDs were left over in a batch that couldn’t be utilized in an EPYC chip — since EPYC CPUs required 8 CCDs at the time.

This led Mehra and his cohorts to re-purpose the seven V-Cache-equipped dies for desktop use, building out multiple designs including 8, 12, and 16 core variants. This is what lead AMD to research the capabilities of 3D-VCache in desktop workloads and discover the incredible gaming performance V-Cache offers, giving birth to the Ryzen 7 5800X3D.

AMD showed off two functional high-core counts Zen 3 X3D prototypes to Gamers Nexus, including a 16-core and 12-core model featuring 3D-VCache on both CCDs. The chips were fully functional within Windows actively and were shown actively running an AIDA64 stress test on screen. Bill Alverson showed a glimpse of the chip’s specs in Task Manger, revealing the massive 192MB of L3 cache equipped on both CPUs, thanks to the “dual 3D-VCache” implementation.

Alverson and Mehra didn’t disclose AMD’s exact reasons for not shipping out 12-core and 16-core Ryzen 5000X3D CPUs, however, they did highlight the disadvantages of 3D-VCache on Ryzen CPUs with two CCD, since there is a large latency penalty that occurs when two CCDs talk to each other through the Infinity Fabric, nullifying any potential benefits the 3D-VCache might have when an application is utilizing both CCDs.

Obviously, at the time AMD didn’t take into account hybrid users that might want a high core count X3D chip for work and play, but it is something they were thinking about and something it rectified with the release of its Ryzen 9 7950X3D and 7900X3D.

AMD's beastly Ryzen 9 5950X is seeing a price reduction today, bringing it down to its lowest ever price of $499 on Amazon. This CPU is a productivity powerhouse and the current flagship AMD processor--at least until Ryzen 7000 arrives. We've reviewed the 5950X and looked at how it fits in the CPU hierarchy compared to the other CPUs that are currently available.

Of course, it's not long until the new AM5 platform launches and a new slew of CPUs from AMD hit the market. But if you're looking for an upgrade path for an AM4-based system, then this could be an excellent option to keep your rig relevant for a few more years.  

The Pixio PX277 Prime monitor is reduced to just $229. For this price, you can walk away with a 27-inch 2K IPS panel with a 165Hz refresh rate on DisplayPort and a 1ms response time. This is a quality monitor for the money and the P277 Prime reviewed well in our testing, with some of the only negatives being its "out of the box calibration" and "no extra contrast in HDR mode". 

If you're looking save some money on a high-speed Gen4 NVMe SSD, then consider the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 1TB SSD for $127. With great read and write speeds, this storage drive is great value while it's on sale and can help speed up your load times in games.

Keep scrolling for more of today's best deals. 

TL;DR — Today’s Best Deals

• AMD Ryzen 9 5950X CPU: was $799, now $499 at Amazon
• Pixio PX277 Prime 27-inch IPS Gaming Monitor: was $259, now $229 with $30 coupon at Amazon
• Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus PCIe 4 1TB SSD: was $159, now $127 at Amazon
• AMD Ryzen 5 5600G CPU: was $259, now $149 at Amazon
• Asus ROG Zephyrus G15 (RTX 3080) Gaming Laptop: was $2,199, now $1,799 at Best Buy

Today’s best deals in detail

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Benchleaks has unearthed what appears to be one of the first sightings of an Intel Raptor Lake Core i7-13700K in the Geekbench online results databases, showing that Intel has quite the roster of chips to compete with AMD's pending Ryzen 7000 series. According to the testing app’s sysinfo summary, the 13700K is a 16C / 24T CPU which has a base clock of 3.39 GHz and a boost clock of 5.29 GHz. Thanks to this potent mix of modern cores, clocks, and caches - the purported 13700K scored 2,090 in Geekbench’s single-thread (1T) tests and 16,542 in the multi-thread (nT) tests.

There was a time not long ago when Intel’s unlocked Core i7 CPU would have been a flagship part, but in recent years the i9 series has stolen its thunder. Nevertheless, the 13th-Gen Intel Core i7 K model looks like it will be a beast, if we take this score as genuine and compare with averages held in the Geekbench database. For example, it trounces the current AMD consumer flagship Ryzen 9 5950X in single thread tests and edges ahead in multi-thread tests. With finished silicon (it may be an engineering test chip here), an optimized BIOS, a 700-series chipset motherboard, and platform appropriate DDR5 RAM kit, this CPU should comfortably reach even higher. And that's well before we bring any CPU overclocking into the equation. 

Above, we have compiled a table of known CPU performance in Geekbench vs the leaked CPU*. In single-threaded tests, the Raptor Lake chip takes the crown with some level of comfort. There is no better single-threaded test chip in the Geekbench database (but there are no other Raptor Lake chips, yet).

Moving along to the multi-threaded test results, the Core i7's 16,542 score is a smidgeon faster than AMD’s Ryzen 9 5950X, despite the cores/threads deficit (16C/24T vs 16C/32T). That is a worthy intergenerational leap up the processor pecking order.

Perhaps a better metric to highlight the qualities of the new Core i7-13700K is to compare its score against the Core i7-12700K. In this case, the nT score is 15% faster for the Raptor Lake chip. Remember, though, the Raptor Lake CPUs we have seen double up the Efficiency core counts, so this i7 vs i7 fight is between a 16C/24T Raptor Lake and a 12C/20T Alder Lake CPU.

We have recently also reported on what appear to be genuine benchmarks of pre-release Intel Core i5-13600K and Core i9-13900K processors. With the Core i7-13700K above, we might have collected the whole set of upcoming unlocked 13th-Gen Core CPUs that will soon vie for a spot on our list of Best CPUs for gaming. For more Raptor Lake reading please dive into our extensive Intel 13th-Gen Raptor Lake all we know article.

Intel’s upcoming Core i5 Raptor Lake processors are shaping up to be serious multi-threaded monsters against the best CPUs, according to new Geekbench 5 benchmarks shared on Twitter. Resident leaker @harukaze5719 shared two new Core i5-13600K benchmarks today, which showcases the new chip dominating its predecessor, the 12600K, and coming close to matching the score of AMD's Ryzen 9 5950X flagship.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this happen, a few days ago we reported on an engineering sample 13600K nearly matching the 5950X in CInebench R23 and in CPU-Z. So with both benchmarks backing each other up, these performance numbers could be legitimate estimations of the 13600K’s real-world synthetic performance, assuming clock speeds don’t change.

Harukaze shared two 13600K benchmarks, one running the chip on an Asus ROG Maximum Z690 Extreme and another with the ASRock Z690 Steel Legend WiFi. The Z690 Extreme scored the highest of the two with a single-threaded Geekbench 5 result of 2,012 points and a multi-threaded score of 16,054.

The ASRock results underperform by a little bit in the single-threaded results with a score of 1,980, but the performance disparity increases a lot more in the multi-threaded benchmark results with a score of 14,425 — an 11% reduction compared to the Z690 Extreme. We aren’t sure what exactly is going on here, but it's safe to assume the Z690 Extreme is automatically tuning the 13600K’s power limits higher or it is increasing the duration of the turbo boost limit (if there are any) since it is - after all, Asus’ flagship motherboard designed for overclocking. ASRock's Z690 Steel Legend on the other hand, is more of an entry-level/mid-range platform instead.

Nonetheless, these results are seriously impressive for a mid-range processor and a massive jump up from Intel’s current mid-range king, the Core i5-12600K. If we take the best performing 13600K results and compare them to Harukaze's 12600K results, the 13600K is a whopping 38% faster in the multi-threaded score, and a respectable 8% faster in the single-threaded area.

This massive multi-core jump can be attributed to Intel’s new Raptor Lake microarchitecture, featuring an updated combination of P cores and E cores. This new combo will give 13th gen chips twice the amount of efficiency cores compared to Alder Lake. Giving the 13600K access to eight efficiency cores, for a grand total of 14 cores and 20 threads (E cores don’t have hyperthreading). The 12600K has just four E-cores for a total of ten cores in all.

Four small cores don’t sound like a lot of extra power but combined with Raptor Lake’s faster "Raptor Cove: cores, the multi-threaded gains are impressive, to say the least. The performance improvements on the 13600K are also enough to close the gap on AMD’s Ryzen 9 5950X with 16 high-performance Zen 3 cores, with a Geekbench 5 result just 3% behind the AMD part.

But there is also a chance the 13600K could be even faster if the clock speeds aren’t finalized. Current rumors speculate that the flagship Raptor Lake parts will feature clock speeds upwards of 5.6 or 5.7 GHz, which would be the highest official clocks ever on a consumer processor. The 13600K clock speeds shown in these Geekbench 5 results peaked at just 5.1GHz, so there is definitely a chance Intel will increase clock speeds for the retail product.

A Chinese netizen has published some eyebrow-raising screenshots claimed to be from a system powered by an Intel Core i5-13600K processor. Enthusiastic Citizen’s Bilibili post shows this purported mid-range overclocker-friendly CPU could provide an irresistible price/performance combination for enthusiasts. The chip outpaces AMD’s Ryzen 9 5950X in CPU-Z (1T and nT tests), and is just 7 or 8% slower in Cinebench R23 multi-core benchmarks.

According to the above-linked post, the Raptor Lake chip under scrutiny is an ES3 (engineering sample, third revision) but is configured with QS (qualification sample) clocks. Enthusiastic Citizen says he also has an actual QS chip, but it is “too early” to share its benchmarks and is waiting for Intel and its board partners to make various refinements before sharing more.

The key purported specs of the Intel Core i5-13600K are a core configuration of 6 Performance and 8 Efficiency cores for 20 processing threads, an all-core turbo of 5.1 GHz, with 24MB of L3 cache. Unfortunately, this processor ate up to 173W at 1.31V, with “room for optimization,” according to the tester.

To give you a clear view of the performance stats that have been shared, and to put them into perspective, please check out the contemporary comparison table below. Our comparison data for all the other CPUs was pulled from our Core i9 12900K review.

Cinebench R23 Single-Thread Issues

Above there are some clear and simple conclusions that can be drawn from the numbers. But before we go further, Enthusiastic Citizen reckons there may be a BIOS bug holding the 13600K back. We don’t see motherboard details in any screenshots, but it is claimed that the “early Z790” motherboard could be at fault, causing the unexpectedly low Cinebench R23 single-threaded score. Perhaps the software used an efficiency core for this test, a basic error on unknown silicon.

If we discount the Cinebench 23 single-threaded scores, the multi-threaded scores remain very impressive; coming in about 30% faster than its predecessor. It is also within single figure percentage performance differences to the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X.

CPU-Z scores are perhaps clearer to interpret, as there seems to be no ‘BIOS issue’ at play. The Raptor Lake chip has the best single-thread scores in this synthetic test, and its multi-threaded test result is within striking distance of the original Alder Lake flagship (i9-12900K).

Lastly, in subsequent comments on the benchmark scores we have shared above, Enthusiastic Citizen says he will be testing his QS chip in gaming in due course.

Over the last few days, we have reported on multiple leaked benchmarks for the Intel Core i9-13900K, covering both applications and gaming.

You can get your hands on AMD's flagship 5950X CPU for only $516 at the moment. This processor is an absolute beast on large workloads and great for tasks such as video rendering. Check out our CPU hierarchy for more details on this CPU and our review of the 5950X for its pros and cons.

Grab a great deal on Gigabyte's Aero 16-inch 4K OLED gaming laptop that's been reduced to just $1,599.  Featuring Intel's 12th Gen Alder Lake CPU and a powerful Nvidia RTX 3070 Ti, this laptop can power the latest software on its high-res screen.

For makers and crafters out there, you can save big on an Anycubic Mega X 3D Printer for only $339 while supplies last. This printer has a large print bed and is perfect for those big projects and chunky prints. 

More great deals on monitors and laptops are below.  

TL;DR — Today’s Best Deals

• AMD Ryzen 9 5950X CPU: was $799, now $516 at Amazon
• Gigabyte AERO 16-Inch 4K AMOLED Gaming Laptop: was $2,349, now $1,599 at Best Buy
• Anycubic Mega X 3D Printer: was $579, now $339 at Amazon
• LG 24MP60G-B 24-Inch IPS Monitor: was $170, now $136 at Amazon
• Gigabyte A5 K1 (RTX3060) Gaming Laptop: was $1,199, now $899 at Best Buy

Today’s best deals in detail

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Memorial Day weekend has come and gone, but the deals don't end there. We've found some more great deals for you that should save you a few bucks.

AMD's flagship consumer processor the Ryzen 9 5950X is down to $525 at the moment — that's the cheapest I've seen it in a little while as it's been fluctuating between $600-$550 recently. Check out our review of the 5950X for more details. 

Here's a good price on an RTX 3080 powered Asus ROG Zephyrus G15 for $1,899. This config includes a powerful Ryzen 9 5900HS, 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. 

The GeeekPi Raspberry Pi Cluster Case is on sale for $49 at Amazon. This is the cheapest I've seen this Pi case since it's been on our Best Raspberry Pi deals list. It has dual fans for cooling down your stack of components and is a great option for building a little cluster of your own.

More deals are below.

TL;DR — Today’s Best Deals

• AMD Ryzen 9 5950X CPU: was $799, now $525 at Amazon
• Asus ROG Zephyrus G15 (RTX 3080) Gaming Laptop: was $2,199, now $1,899 at Best Buy
• GeeekPi Raspberry Pi Cluster Case: was $62, now $49 at Amazon
• WD Black SN850 NVMe M.2 1TB SSD: was $155, now $135 at Newegg
• KYY 15.6inch 1080P FHD USB-C Laptop Monitor: was $199, now $149 with coupon at Amazon

Today’s best deals in detail

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Amazon has lowered the price of AMD's Flagship CPU, the Ryzen 9 5950X, to just £495. This is a great price for the gaming and productivity powerhouse and puts it in a much more competitive position with Intel's Core i9-12900K and 12900KS.

AMD's Ryzen 9 5950X CPU comes with 16 cores and 32 threads and core clock speeds that can boost up to 4.9GHz. This AM4 socket chip also has 64MB of L3 cache and a low TDP of only 105W.

Having recently been usurped by Intel's 12th Gen Alder Lake CPUs in gaming, and now the recently released (and out of stock) AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D, the power of the  5950X is in its 16 cores — that can turn it into a productivity beast that is amazing at tasks like compiling and video rendering, where all its cores can be made use of. 

Don't be fooled into thinking this CPU is only good for large workloads as it's also a fantastic CPU to game on, so you do get the best of both worlds with this processor. Have a look at our best CPU for gaming list for an idea of the 5950X's performance. 

The AMD Ryzen 9 5950X does not come packaged with a retail cooler so you will need to take that into consideration when purchasing this CPU as it does get warm when under load. Make sure it's something beefy that can keep this monster cool. 

Now is an excellent time to buy a new processor for your gaming rig, as AMD pricing hits new lows. Just three weeks ago, we were elated to see that AMD's flagship Ryzen 9 5950X Zen 3 processor had fallen to just $599 across major retailers. Today, thanks to a new discount code, that price dropped by another $50 at Newegg.

You have to jump through one extra hoop to get today's $549 deal, but we don't think that many people will complain when saving $50. Instead of purchasing the 5950X from the relative comfort of your PC's web browser, you will need to download and install Newegg's mobile app (Android, iOS). Once you have the app installed, you'll need to enter the code MBLCATE at checkout to receive the $50 discount. From there, you'll just proceed through checkout as you normally would when using the Newegg app. 

The 5950X purchase also comes with a free promo offer, which gives you one month of Xbox Game Pass.

With this new low price, the 5950X solidifies its position as one of the best CPUs for gaming while also doubling as a productivity powerhouse thanks to its 16 cores and 32 threads. The 7nm CPU has a base clock of 3.4 GHz and a maximum boost frequency of 4.9 GHz, all while operating within a 105W TDP.

Today's red hot deal comes just a week after AMD launched a new wave of affordable processors ranging from the $99 Ryzen 3 4100 (Zen 2, 4 cores, 8 threads) to the $199 Ryzen 5 5600 (Zen 3, 6 cores, 12 threads) to the $299 Ryzen 7 5700X (Zen 3, 8 cores, 16 threads). In addition, AMD also introduced the intriguing new Ryzen 7 5800X3D at $449, which aims to boost gaming performance by up to 15 percent over the Ryzen 9 5900X, thanks to the inclusion of an extra 64MB of L3 cache.

It's fair to say that AMD's price cuts and the announcement of new, more affordable SKUs are in direct response to Intel's 12th generation Alder Lake family of desktop processors. Led by Intel's Core i9-12900K, Intel's new processors have emerged as a popular pick for enthusiasts thanks to excellent performance bang for your buck.

Intel's cherry-picked Core i9-12900KS, which will challenge the best CPUs, isn't officially out yet. However, some retailers have jumped the gun and shipped the special edition Alder Lake chip to customers. Reddit user Seby9123 was one of the lucky ones that got a Core i9-12900KS before everyone else, and they put it through Cinebench R23.

The Core i9-12900KS will offer the same cores as the regular Core i9-12900K. However, the Alder Lake processor's most considerable appeal comes in the shape of its higher clock speeds. In a nutshell, consumers are receiving a 200 MHz higher base and boost clock over the Core i9-12900K. The Redditor confirmed the Core i9-12900K's behavior in the Cinebench R23 runs, where the 16-core chip had two of its P-cores boosted to 5.5 GHz and the rest to 5.2 GHz. The E-cores, on the other hand, maxed out at 4 GHz.

Cinebench R23 is part of our CPU test suite, allowing us to compare our existing data for other processors to the Redditor's Core i9-12900KS results. However, the user used DDR5-6200 at 32-38-38-76, whereas our DDR5 platform revolved around DDR5-4400 with timings set at 36-36-36-72. So, the Redditor had the upper hand since their system had faster memory. On the other hand, our DDR4 platform utilized DDR4-3200 with 14-14-14-36 timings. The Redditor tested on Windows 10, so we used our Windows 10 results for comparison.

The Core i9-12900KS exhibited a 6.7% higher single-core performance than the Core i9-12900K (DDR5). The Intel chip also outperformed the Ryzen 9 5950X by 29.6%. In addition, the Cinebench R23 margins are slightly higher than the previously leaked Geekbench 5 submissions. In terms of multi-core performance, the Core i9-12900KS was head of the Core i9-12900K by 5.7% and outpaced the Ryzen 9 5950X by 9.2%. 

It remains to be seen whether the Core i9-12900KS will offer noticeable improvements in real-world workloads but, more importantly, in gaming. When Intel first showed off the Core i9-12900KS, the chipmaker confirmed that it would ship the special edition Alder Lake chip by the end of this quarter. Now that AMD has confirmed the launch date for the Ryzen 7 5800X3D to April 20, the Core i9-12900KS shouldn't be far behind.

The AMD Ryzen 9 5950X has just dropped to its lowest ever price of $599. That's a great price for one of the best CPUs on the market. Why not have a look at our Ryzen 9 5950X review for more details. Hurry and grab one whilst stocks last - it surely can't stay at this price for long. 

Also on today's menu are the WD Black SN850 for $261 and a further $100 slashed off the price of the ASRock OC Formula Radeon RX 6900XT - what a great day for deals.

Scroll down for even more great offers in today's Real Deals!

TL;DR — Today’s Best Deals

• AMD Ryzen 9 5950X: was $799, now $599 at Amazon
• WD Black SN850 NVMe M.2 2TB: was $330, now $261 at Amazon
• ASRock OC Formula Radeon RX 6900XT: was $1,700, now $1,500 at Newegg
• Intel Core i7-12700K: was $414, now $380 at Newegg
• Thermaltake Toughpower GF1 850W: was $140, now $100 at Amazon

Today’s best deals in detail

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• Best Raspberry Pi deals

Competition is good, and that is especially the case in the high-stakes flagship desktop CPU segment. Prior to the arrival of Intel's Alder Lake family of processors -- specifically the Core i9-12900K -- AMD's Zen 3-based Ryzen 9 5950X ruled the roost, and steep discounts weren't commonly found. But now that the Core i9-12900K is flexing its performance muscles across a broad spectrum of benchmarks at a lower MSRP, taking a spot on our list of best CPUs for gaming, sales on the Ryzen 9 5950X have become more frequent.

Two weeks ago, the processor fell to an all-time low of just $629 on eBay. Today, the processor dropped even further to just $599.99 over at Newegg. Given that the Ryzen 9 5950X has a list price of $799, this $200 discount is welcome news to those that sit firmly in the AMD camp and want to plug it into one of the best X570 motherboards. Interestingly, the Core i9-12900K features the exact same price as Newegg (after a $13.98 coupon).

If you'd prefer to go the Amazon route, that retailer also has the Ryzen 9 5950X priced at $599, with free one-day delivery for Prime subscribers.

The Ryzen 9 5950X remains one of the best CPUs for gaming, and it's especially adept at productivity tasks due to its solid multi-threaded performance. The processor comes with a base clock of 3.4 GHz and a maximum boost frequency of 4.9 GHz. The Ryzen 9 5950X is built on TSMC's 7nm FinFET process node, pairing 8MB of L2 cache with a capacious 64MB of L3 cache. The processor has a relatively tame TDP of just 105 watts despite its performance credentials.

While the Ryzen 9 5950X currently rules the roost for AMD's consumer desktop platforms, some excitement is brewing for future processor releases. First up will be the Ryzen 9 5800X3D with AMD's 3D V-Cache technology, followed by the next-generation Ryzen 7000 family, powered by 5nm Zen 4 "Raphael" architecture.

This is a great time to get your hands on a Ryzen 9 5950X for just $629 on eBay. AMD's flagship processor is capable of running all the latest games and applications at their full potential and is backward compatible with most AM4 socket motherboards - with the appropriate BIOS updates. The Ryzen 9 5950X also received our Editors Choice award for its specs and performance.

Do you want more storage on your PC? Then this Samsung 980 PRO 1TB NVMe SSD could be just what you're looking for. If it's a budget gaming headset you want so that you can issue commands and hear your opponents creeping up on you, then this Astro A10 has over 50% off of its usual asking price right now.   

Check below for even more great deals today.

TL;DR — Today’s best deals

• AMD Ryzen 9 5950X: was $799, now $629 at eBay
• Samsung 980 PRO M.2 1TB: was $229, now $149 at Amazon
• Astro A10 Gaming Headset: was $59, now $24 at Newegg with code PRSBPA522
• Razer Huntsman V2: was $249, now $199 at Amazon
• HP Victus Gaming Laptop: was $859, now $749 at Newegg

Today’s best deals in detail

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Intel teased some Core i9-12900KS processor details during CES 2022, but we are still waiting for this processor's official launch and availability. In the meantime, Twitter's HXL has spotted a China-based secondhand seller trying to offload an "almost brand-new" Core i9-12900KS. In addition, the listing has screenshots of this highly anticipated CPU in action. If the used-CPU advert and screenshots are genuine, the Intel Core i9-12900KS with 16C/24T can score 29,519 in Cinebench R23 without breaking a sweat.

In the first screenshot from the Chinese listing, Cinebench R23 runs in the upper left of the screen. The Core i9-12900KS' score is pretty much as expected. It is comfortably above (+900cb) the likes of significant premium consumer rivals, such as the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X with its 16C/32T and is within touching distance (-500cb) of the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2950X with 32C/64T.

Elsewhere in this first screenshot, the Core i9-12900KS' purported 3.2 GHz base clock is within view. The figure is identical to that of the Core i9-12900K. Moving on to the boost clocks, the used sample on sale hits 5.4 GHz, 200 MHz faster than the i9-12900K, or provides an approximate 4% uplift by this metric. The processor doesn't quite make it to a 5.5 GHz boost clock, and this could be due to the processor being an engineering sample, the motherboard BIOS not correctly supporting the high boost, or both of these factors.

The second screenshot released by the seller primarily concerns the memory performance that the system has achieved with this new yet-to-be-made official CPU. We see that the quad-channel memory kit installed hits DDR5-7398, and the memory latency checks in at 51.5ns. Interestingly, while the Cinebench testing was on an Asus motherboard, the memory testing screens showed an MSI motherboard in use. The seller has access to a lot of high-end PC hardware.

At 29,999 Chinese Yuan, this purported Intel Core i9-12900KS is the equivalent of approximately $4,700. Of course, the seller is hoping to capitalize on this CPU not yet being official, but any buyer would have to be quite a risk-taker.

As a reminder, Intel's tease of the Core i9-12900KS, which we reported upon at the start of the month, indicated that it was still sorting and binning chips to achieve an out-of-the-box 5.5 GHz boost. With the increased clocks/power consumption, we still reckon it will need some sort of advanced cooling to perform as enthusiasts would expect comfortably. At CES 2022, Intel said these factory-overclocked processors would ship by the end of Q1 2022.

TechEpiphany has decided to install AMD's Ryzen 9 5950X on one of the cheapest A320 chipset motherboards on the market, the Asus A320M-K. Thanks to new official support for Ryzen 5000 series on select A320 motherboards, AMD's flagship Ryzen 9 5950X CPU appears to be perfectly happy living in the A320 motherboard with reported CPU clock speed spikes 5 GHz thanks to the enablement of PBO.

A single core out of a 16-core processor boosting to 5 GHz looks good and all. However, the more affordable 300 series motherboards have modest power delivery subsystems that may not extract the full performance of a high-end chip, such as the Ryzen 9 5950X. For example, multi-core performance could vary by 20% to 30% on a budget A320 motherboard compared to a higher-end motherboard.

This configuration is possible only because Asus gives its A320 motherboards full Ryzen 5000 series support with a new BIOS and the latest AGESA code, version 1.2.0.3C. We reported on this two months ago, noting that Gigabyte and Asus, in particular, have begun delivering new BIOS updates to A320 boards to support AMD's latest Ryzen 5000 series processors.

More specifically, the BIOS name containing the new AGESA code is version 5862, and it came out in November of last year. Patch notes indicate that the updated AGESA code adds support for new processors and drops Bristol Ridge 7th Gen A-series and Athlon X4 series CPU support entirely to make that happen. Strangely, the CPU support list does not reflect any updates to show Ryzen 5000 series support, and the patch notes don't indicate Ryzen 5000 processors, in particular. However, we're confident Asus is talking about Ryzen 5000 support, as they are the newest processors AMD currently makes.

For some reason, this phenomenon is only happening on A320 chipset motherboards for the time being, as motherboard makers haven't enabled Ryzen 5000 support on more appropriate chipsets such as B350 and X370.

But, there is still hope; yesterday, we reported that AMD is not giving up supporting 300 series chipset motherboards just yet. AMD's corporate VP, David McAfee, notes he and the engineering team are hard at work trying to figure out a way to get Ryzen 5000 support on 300 series boards and how to get the chips running smoothly at the same time.

Due to the age of 300 series motherboards, getting Ryzen 5000 to perform well is not an easy task. There are several blockers in place, including IRM definitions and current capabilities from the motherboards VRM -- which for most 300 series boards, is notably weaker than that of B550 and X570 boards. As a result, the boards can't deliver enough power to Ryzen 5000 chips to perform adequately on 500 series boards.

AMD also notes 300 series motherboards lack support in its engineering validation coverage matrix. As a result, AMD does not test 300 series boards when producing a new AGESA code to push out to motherboard manufacturers. Meaning, all the system stability of the new code falls exclusively on the motherboard makers themselves if they are patching 300 series boards to the more recent version.

Due to this, we would recommend you use caution when taking advantage of Ryzen 5000 series support on A320. There is a higher chance of bugs occurring on these older motherboards. Keep in mind that most A320 motherboards have vastly weaker power delivery setups than B350 and X370 chipset motherboards (let alone 500 series). Running a Ryzen 9 5950X at its maximum power rating could be dangerous.

To avoid this, be sure to do research and make sure your specific A320 motherboard has a beefy VRM system to handle Ryzen 5000 -- or at the very least, turn the eco mode on if necessary.

As fate would have it, Intel's new Alder Lake Core i9-12900K has exactly tied AMD's own Ryzen 9 5950X in a world-record Cinebench run at 15,664 points. As shared on Facebook, Splave, the overall #1 overclocker in the world, posted the world record today, with his Core i9-12900K scoring the highest score we've seen in Cinebench R20 from Intel's new Alder Lake architecture to date.

The world record is a tie with Splave's own world-record Ryzen 9 5950X Cinebench R20 score of 15664, made nearly a year ago. That record still holds as the highest-scoring AMD Ryzen 5000 series CPU to date.

The fact that both CPUs managed to tie each other is quite surprising. In fact, we believe it's unprecedented for two chips to achieve an exact tie in a world record for this benchmark. The chances of this happening are incredibly slim, especially given the fact that Intel's 12900K runs on a completely different architecture compared to the Ryzen 5000 series with a hybrid core layout with a mixture of big cores and small cores. In contrast, the 5950X only has big cores. On top of this, the 12900K is also running DDR5 instead of DDR4 memory, which differentiates the two platforms even further.

The amazing world record was accomplished, as always, with liquid nitrogen cooling on both platforms. The Core i9-12900K operated at 6.9GHz on its main P-cores at a core voltage of 1.58v. The small efficiency cores were also overclocked, but at a substantially lower 5.4GHz, though at nearly the same voltage of 1.57V.

Memory used on the Intel system was 16GB of TeamGroup DDR5, operating at 6565MHz with rather tight timings of CL30-37-37-57 on an AsRock Z690 Aqua OC motherboard.

As for the Ryzen platform, that world-record run was achieved with a Ryzen 9 5950X overclocked to a flat 6GHz on all 16 cores (at an unknown voltage). Memory used was 16GB of G.Skill DDR4 running at 4000MHz with super tight CL14-14-14-48 timings, all installed into an Asrock X570 Aqua motherboard.

We're sure it won't be long until someone breaks the tie by at least one point (probably Splave himself), but it is still spectacular that Intel's new best-of-the-best Alder Lake CPU could only just manage a tie with AMD's much older (but still current) Zen 3 flagship. The Intel vs AMD battle rages ever on. 

Laptop manufacturer Eurocom has created a new 15.6-inch notebook called the Nightsky ARX315 that houses a full-blown Ryzen 9 5950X 16-core desktop chip and can be equipped with either an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 or RTX 3070 mobile GPU. With the 5950X and RTX 3070 included, pricing starts at $2,683.

Eurocom built the ARX315 with a thick 1.3-inch housing and the necessary cooling to handle the desktop-class processor. A heatsink made entirely of copper and cools the CPU, GPU and power delivery systems. Connecting all four heatsinks together are six heat pipes in total, with two large fans cooling the laptop down.

If you find the 5950X has too many cores for your liking, the ARX315 can also be outfitted with an 8-core Ryzen 7 5800X or 12-core Ryzen 9 5950X CPU depending on your needs.

The exterior of the chassis is colored in a stealthy matte black finish, accented by four exhaust ports that house the copper heatsinks that are visible to the naked eye. The laptop also comes with a LED-backlit keyboard (with 15 color options) and a 240Hz matt display (the resolution is unknown).

Along the right of the laptop are a mic/headphone jack, another microphone jack (yes two jacks), and a single USB 3.0 port. At the rear, there is a USB Type-C port, full HDMI port, mini DisplayPort, and AC power. To the left, you get a Kensington lock RJ-45 ethernet port, dual USB 3.2 ports and a MicroSD card reader.

For storage and memory, you get a good selection of options including dual M.2 NVMe 2280 slots and a single 7mm SSD/HDD hard drive slot for bulkier storage solutions. Sandwiched between the M.2 slots and hard drive slot are two DDR4 SODIMM slots capable of running up to 64GB of 3200Hz DDR4 memory.

This laptop is optimal for power users and professionals who need a desktop replacement capable of quickly crunching through big CPU workloads. Just keep in mind that laptops housing desktop components typically are best suited to desk duty plugged into the wall. Battery life with these notebooks is generally terrible and is best left for times where you only need to be on battery for a short period of time.

Hardware detective Komachi_Ensaka has dug up what appears to be the first benchmark for Intel's Raptor Lake processors. Although Alder Lake just came out recently, Intel is already preparing the way for its successor.

BAPCo's Crossmark software labeled the 13th Gen Raptor Lake chip as a "Genuine Intel 0000" processor, so its exact model is unknown for the moment. Therefore, we should take the specifications with a pinch of salt since it's normal for software to misreport unreleased hardware.

According to the report, the Raptor Lake processor reportedly wields 24 cores and 32 logical cores. For reference, the Core i9-12900K comes with eight Golden Cove cores and eight Gracemont cores, for a total of 16 cores and 24 logical cores. It's possible the core count is from a reporting error on the software's part, but more likely is that Intel has upped Raptor Lake's E-core count. There have been rumors that Intel might add more Gracement cores to Raptor Lake, and the report on the mystery Raptor Lake processor indicates an 8P+16E design. 

The person or company that tested the Raptor Lake processor has erased the submission from Crossmark's database, which isn't too surprising. In fact, Intel has a history of close ties with Business Applications Performance Corporation (BAPCo), the company that created the Crossmark benchmark. We don't use this benchmark in our own testing, so take that into consideration — especially when looking at any AMD test results.

Given the time frame, it's also important to highlight that the Raptor Lake processor is an early engineering sample. This means that clock speeds aren't finalized, and software likely isn't optimized for it, similar to what we saw with Alder Lake. It's very likely that this early sample is running at reduced fixed clock speeds.

Since BapCo's software isn't part of our benchmarking suite, we'll turn to HotHardware's results for comparison. The publication paired the Core i9-12900K with DDR5-4800 memory, which is the same data rate used in the Crossmark submission. Therefore, the results should be comparable.

Intel Raptor Lake CPU Benchmarks

Overall, the Core i9-12900K delivered up to 49.3% higher performance than the Raptor Lake processor. Even the Ryzen 9 5950X outperformed the Raptor Lake part by 6.5%, which is a bit embarrassing for Intel. We'll have to wait for more leaked benchmarks to see how Raptor Lake stacks up, though, as the early nature of the Raptor Lake silicon obviously plays a part here.

Raptor Lake is expected to land in 2022 on the same LGA1700 socket as Alder Lake. A recent Intel patent about the Digital Linear Voltage Regulator (D-LVR) suggests that Raptor Lake could boast a 25% lower power consumption. Other rumors claim that the 13th Gen processors will allegedly arrive with an improved hybrid design for better performance and an enhanced CPU cache for gaming.

The AMD Ryzen 9 5950X is one of the leading desktop processors that you can purchase today, which is why is has spent considerable time on our Best CPU for gaming list. Though Intel's new Intel Core i9-12900K beats it on some benchmarks, the Ryzen 9 5950X still packs a mighty punch with 16 cores and 32 threads of Zen 3 goodness. This chip is in great demand among power users who game or use heavily-threaded applications such as those for 3D rendering.

The Ryzen 9 5950X has a $799 MSRP and is usually on sale for around $750. However, eBay is currently selling the flagship Zen 3 desktop processor at an all-time low price of $679. If you can't get it or prefer not to get it from eBay, Newegg also has the 5950X for $719. In addition, if you have a Micro Center nearby, you can save an additional $20 at a price of $699.99. In other words, these are among the best CPU deals that we've seen so far.

While the Ryzen 9 5950X is one of the best CPUs for gaming, it's also a beast in productivity tasks thanks to its solid multi-threaded performance. The processor has a base clock of 3.4 GHz and features a maximum boost frequency of 4.9 GHz. Built on TSMC's 7nm FinFET process node, it has 8MB of L2 cache and a staggering 64MB of L3 cache. Despite its overachieving specs, the Ryzen 9 5950X has a relatively tame TDP of just 105 watts.

The Ryzen 9 5950X still sets the bar extremely high for desktop processor power efficiency compared to the computing Core i9-12900K but comes up short regarding pricing. Even with its new low price of $699 at Micro Center, the Ryzen 9 5950X is still over $100 more expensive than the $589 Core i9-12900K. However, that price difference can be easily erased when you factor in the costs of high-end Z690 motherboards and DDR5 memory modules (if you want the best performance). 

In any case, the Ryzen 9 5950X remains a standout flagship processor that pairs nicely with the best X570 motherboards available on the market. With the potent combination, you'll have a rig that will be just as capable of handling the most demanding AAA games (when hooked up with one of the best GPUs) as it is tackling productivity tasks.

Best AMD Ryzen 9 5950X Deals

These are the best prices on the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X right now.

You can find even more savings at our best Cyber Monday PC gaming deals page. We're also tracking the best Cyber Monday monitor deals, best Cyber Monday CPU deals, best Cyber Monday SSD deals, best Cyber Monday gaming laptop deals, best Cyber Monday keyboard deals, best Cyber Monday gaming mouse deals and the best Cyber Monday PC hardware deals overall. Makers and hobbyists will find sales by checking out the best Cyber Monday 3D printer deals, best Cyber Monday Raspberry Pi deals and best Cyber Monday robot deals. If you're shopping for a graphics card, we even have advice on how to find the best RTX 3080 deals, best RTX 3070 deals and best RTX 3060 deals you can find in this challenging market.

The Intel Core i9-12900K vs AMD Ryzen 9 5900X and Ryzen 9 5950X rivalry is a heated battle for supremacy at the top of the mainstream desktop PC market. Make no mistake, Alder Lake represents a cataclysmic shift in Intel's battle against AMD's potent Ryzen 5000 chips, throwing the AMD vs Intel wars into a state of disarray. We've become accustomed to easy wins for the Ryzen chips — they've absolutely dominated our list of Best CPUs for gaming and our CPU Benchmark hierarchy for the last year — but Intel's new design philosophy is a game-changer.

Alder Lake's new hybrid x86 design represents Intel's most disruptive architectural shift in a decade. The chips combine big and fast Performance cores (P-cores) for latency-sensitive work with a smattering of small and powerful Efficiency cores (E-cores) that chew through background and multi-threaded workloads. Alder Lake's new next-gen connectivity technologies also bring big increases in throughput via DDR5 memory and PCIe 5.0 interfaces, outstripping AMD's venerable AM4 platform.

But pricing trumps all. Intel has decided to be incredibly aggressive with its newest line of chips, perhaps looking to smash the Ryzen revolt once and for all. As a result, the $589 Core i9-12900K's pricing lands between the $799 Ryzen 9 5950X and the $549 Ryzen 9 5900X. Still, it regularly trades blows, and even beats, the 5950X in many threaded applications that have become Ryzen's uncontested stomping grounds, like Cinebench.

It isn't all sunshine and roses for Alder Lake, though. Intel made a few decisions that impacted the value proposition, like launching the chips without the affordable B- and H-series motherboards that tend to be the favorite for mainstream gamers. The new hybrid design also has a few early teething pains in Windows 10.

All of this means this is anything but the clear-cut victory it appears to be on the benchmark charts. Below we've put the Core i9-12900K vs Ryzen 9 5900X and Ryzen 9 5590X in a six-round faceoff to see which chip takes the crown in our gaming and application benchmarks, along with other key criteria like power consumption and pricing. Let's see how the chips stack up. 

Features and Specifications: Intel Core i9-12900K vs Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X 

Intel's hybrid architecture brings what we would normally consider 'odd' thread arrangements. That's because the P-cores are hyper-threaded, while the E-cores only have a single thread.

As a result, Intel's $589 16-core Core i9-12900K comes with eight P-cores that support hyper-threading, and eight single-threaded E-cores for a total of 24 threads. That's a 33% increase in thread count over the previous-gen Core i9-11900K. The P-cores have a 3.2 GHz base, and peak frequencies reach 5.2 GHz with Turbo Boost Max 3.0 (this feature is only active on P-cores). Meanwhile, the E-cores have a 2.4 GHz base and stretch up to 3.9 GHz via the standard Turbo Boost 2.0. The chip is also equipped with 30MB of L3 cache and 14MB of L2.

The 12900K comes with the integrated UHD Graphics 770 engine with 32 EUs that run at 1,700 MHz. That's a big advantage over the graphics-less 5950X and 5900X so, if you don't plan to use a discrete GPU, Intel wins by default. Intel also has the Core i9-12900KF, which is identical to the 12900K but lacks the Intel UHD Graphics 770 engine, for $564.

Intel has replaced its old TDP rating and now uses a Processor Base Power (PBP) value (PL1) in place of TDP and a secondary Maximum Turbo Power (MTP) value that represents the highest power level during boost activity (PL2). You can read more about that change here.

The 12900K comes with 125W PBP (base) and 241W MTP (peak) power ratings, but be aware that Intel changed its default boost duration for all K-series chips to an unlimited value. This means the chip can always operate at the 241W MTP when it is under load, though the actual power use will vary with application intensity.

The 12900K faces off with the 12-core, 24-thread Ryzen 9 5900X and the 16-core 32-thread Ryzen 9 5950X. These chips come with 32MB and 64MB of L3 cache, respectively, only have high-performance cores, and have a 105W TDP rating. Both chips support DDR4-3200 memory and the PCIe 4.0 interface.

The Core i9-12900K has a big lead in terms of connectivity. All Alder Lake chips support DDR4-3200 or up to DDR5-4800 memory (odd DDR5 population rules apply). Alder Lake chips also expose up to 16 lanes of PCIe 5.0 and an additional four lanes of PCIe 4.0 from the chip for M.2 storage. These new technologies add cost to the Z690 motherboards that house the chips, and the current pricing for DDR5 memory is eyewatering. However, Intel's Z690 supports DDR4, too, but it appears that you'll only find DDR4 support on lower-end Z690 boards. Intel hasn't launched the value-centric B- and H-series chipsets yet, so platform pricing will be high for now.

Intel also added 12 lanes of PCIe 4.0 to its chipset (in addition to its 16 lanes of PCIe 3.0), and now offers a total of 28 lanes. Intel has also widened the DMI connection between the chip and the chipset, which now serves up twice the throughput. The increased DMI throughput is also beneficial for Z690's bolstered connectivity options, like the new second USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 20 Gbps connection (other new features are listed here).

Winner: Intel

AMD has earned plenty of kudos for supporting its AM4 platform for five years (and counting), largely because enthusiasts don't have to upgrade motherboards every time they get a new chip. But it has also restricted forward progress on the connectivity front. Intel's Z690 platform has a clear connectivity advantage: With DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 on the menu, AMD's aging AM4 platform is simply outclassed. Those new features do make for more expensive motherboards from Team Blue, but there are options for DDR4 variants to save you at least some coin.

Given its new hybrid architecture with two types of cores, Intel's core counts aren't directly comparable to AMD's due to their different capabilities. Our performance results will dictate the value of the overall designs.

The Core i9-12900K comes with integrated graphics by default, though you can sacrifice those for a slightly lower price point. Meanwhile, AMD has no high-end options that come with integrated graphics, so Intel wins by default if you need an iGPU. None of these chips come with a bundled cooler, either. 

Gaming Benchmarks and Performance: Intel Core i9-12900K vs Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X 

Remember, this article is an overview of our much more in-depth testing in our Intel Core i9-12900K and Core i5-12600K review. We're focusing on our Windows 11 test results in this article, but be aware that you could encounter odd performance in some cases with Windows 10. We have the full details and Windows 10 testing in our review. 

Below you can see the geometric mean of our gaming tests with the Core i9-12900K vs the Ryzen 9 5900X and 5950X at 1080p and 1440p, with each resolution split into its own chart. As per usual, we're testing with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 to reduce GPU-imposed bottlenecks as much as possible, and differences between test subjects will shrink with lesser cards or higher resolutions. 

The $549 12-core Ryzen 9 5900X is AMD's fastest gaming chip, but the $589 Core i9-12900K is 8.7% faster in the cumulative 1080p gaming measurement across our entire test suite. And that's with both the DDR4 and DDR5 memory configurations, so you won't have to drop serious cash on a DDR5 kit to get there.

Moving over to 1440p pushes the bottleneck to the GPU, so the difference between the chips shrinks tremendously. At 1440p, the 12900K is just 3.6% faster than the Ryzen 9 5950X, meaning price could be a determining factor if you game at higher resolutions. Gamers with lower-resolution panels with high refresh rates will benefit more from the 12900K's faster frame rates.

Flipping through the 99th percentile charts shows larger deltas between the chips, but we have to view those with caution. Windows 11 is still a bit raw and seems to suffer from more framerate variability than Windows 10. This could stem from yet-to-be-updated game code, the relatively new GPU drivers for Windows 11, or some other combination of factors that could improve in the future.

Intel's Alder Lake takes a convincing lead in Windows 11, but the big wins in a few of the games can greatly impact these types of cumulative measurements. For instance, Intel takes a big lead in Hitman 3, but that game is specifically tuned to leverage the E-cores by offloading low-priority tasks like audio and physics to the small cores. That type of arrangement could become more common, though. For example, Intel says that streaming your gaming session with OBS, which now runs on the smaller E-cores, can result in 84% more fps than its prior-gen chips. We're working on putting that to the test, but it does show that the E-cores could have a big impact on gaming as more games and applications add support.  

We also included our overall gaming results with Windows 10 at the end of the album. We generated these values with a different set of games from our previous Windows 10 test suite, but they show that much of what we see in Windows 11 carries over to Windows 10, as well. Except for one thing: DDR4 memory yielded better gaming results than DDR5 in Windows 10. We expect that will change as DDR5 matures.

In Windows 10, the 12900K with DDR4 is 7% faster at 1080p than with DDR5, which naturally impacts its position relative to the Ryzen 5950X and 5900X. With DDR5, the 12900K is 2.4% faster than the Ryzen 9 5900X, but that expands to a 9.5% advantage with DDR4 memory.

The AMD vs Intel gaming competition is closer now, with some games favoring one architecture over the other. As such, it's best to make an informed decision based on the types of games that you play frequently. Be sure to check out the individual tests in the above album. In either case, Intel holds the lead.

Winner: Intel

The Core i9-12900K not only delivers a massive gen-on-gen gaming boost for Intel, but it also accelerates past AMD's Ryzen 9 5900X and the Ryzen 9 5950X during all of our tests in both Windows 10 and 11. That lead also applies to both the DDR4 and DDR5 configurations — Alder Lake wins on all fronts.

Of note: The Denuvo DRM falsely identified Intel's E-cores as a separate system, and thus 22 Denuvo-enabled game titles currently don't work with Alder Lake chips. Ten of those games are expected to be patched by the middle of November 2021, and Intel has issued guidance on a workaround that fixes the issue for all impacted titles. You can read about the simple fix and find the impacted games here. Denuvo says that all affected games will be patched soon.  

Application Performance: Intel Core i9-12900K vs Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X 

We're focusing on Windows 11 application test results for this article, but be aware that we encountered subpar performance in Windows 10 with some of the programs that worked perfectly in Windows 11. These problems arise due to a lack of software optimizations for hybrid architectures. 

There are methods to correct those issues in Windows 10, but it could require some manual adjustment until more patches arrive from software vendors. Aside from the odd performance in the Handbrake x264, y-cruncher, Corona and POV-Ray tests, our comparative Windows 10 performance results largely mirrored what we see in Windows 11. Again, head to our review for more detailed information. 

We can boil down productivity application performance into two broad categories: single- and multi-threaded. The first slide above shows the geometric mean of performance in several of our most important tests in each category, but be sure to look at the expanded results below.

The deltas in favor of Alder Lake are very convincing in the overall measure — the Core i9-12900K is 20% faster than the Ryzen 9 5900X and 17% faster than the Ryzen 9 5950X in the single-threaded tasks listed in the chart title. That's impressive. 

Naturally, those big performance deltas won't carry over to every type of workload, but flipping through the album of test results reveals that the Core i9-12900K does truly dominate in this type of work. In fact, the Ryzen 9 5900X and 5950X don't win in a single lightly-threaded test. 

Intel held the single-threaded crown for years before the Ryzen 5000 chips arrived, so it isn't entirely shocking to see it retake the crown. However, the multi-threaded test results are a bit more surprising. 

Alder Lake delivers a few stunning wins in the threaded workloads that Ryzen has dominated for so long, highlighting the advantages of the x86 hybrid architecture. It's almost surreal to see the 24-thread Core i9-12900K with DDR5 memory tie the 32-thread Ryzen 9 5950X in the overall multi-threaded ranking, but even more surprising to see it take a 3% lead with DDR4. That's pretty impressive in light of the 5950X's $800 price tag.

Flipping through the slides finds the 16-core, 24-thread 12900K battling toe-to-toe with the Ryzen 9 5950X in what used to be its uncontested turf. The Core i9-12900K is 3.9% faster than the Ryzen 9 5950X in the threaded Cinebench test and 17% faster in POV-Ray, showing that the hybrid architecture exposes exceptionally strong performance despite the lesser thread count. On the other hand, the 5950X takes the lead in a few of the other threaded applications, but by surprisingly slim deltas given its much higher price tag. Remember, the 12900K's pricing is closer to the 5900X.

Meanwhile, the Core i9-12900K simply outguns the Ryzen 9 5900X in these workloads. The 12900K also beats both Ryzen 9 chips in threaded encoding tasks, like Handbrake x264 and x265, SVT-HEVC, and SVT-AV1. Additionally, from the exceedingly branchy code in the LLVM compilation workload to the massively parallel molecular dynamics simulation code in NAMD, the 12900K impresses in heavily-parallelized high-throughput applications. 

Winner: Intel

Performance values in a vacuum are meaningless: The true relevance of a benchmark result has to be taken in the context of pricing.

Intel's Core i9-12900K took a stunning lead in single-threaded workloads, winning across the board. The 12900K also beat the Ryzen 9 5900X in every multi-threaded workload while beating the Ryzen 9 5950X in a surprising number of threaded benchmarks.

The 12900K suffered a few losses in heavily-threaded workloads to the Ryzen 9 5950X, but those losses were slim considering the $210 difference between the chips. The 12900K's superior blend of both single-and multi-threaded performance, not to mention its pricing, easily throws the scales in its favor. 

It is noteworthy that the Core i9-12900K can suffer in some multi-threaded workloads in Windows 10 due to difficulties with code that has certain prioritization settings. You can correct those issues either via command-line utilities or third-party software, like Process Lasso, and receive the full expected performance. Some vendors have already addressed these teething pains, and we expect the industry to correct many of those issues over time. However, it is important to know that Windows 10 could require additional handholding to extract the utmost performance from the Alder Lake processors. 

Overclocking: Intel Core i9-12900K vs Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X 

We have long since reached the land of diminishing returns for overclocking the highest-end chips from both AMD and Intel, and that includes the Ryzen 9 5900X, Ryzen 5950X and Core i9-12900K. Because AMD has pulled Intel into a heated dogfight for performance superiority on the high end, so much of the overclocking frequency headroom is rolled into standard stock performance. As a result, you'll find larger overclocking gains with the downstream models.

Both Intel and AMD expose a wealth of tunable parameters, along with sophisticated software overclocking utilities like XTU and Ryzen Master. They both also support per-core frequency and hyper-threading control (enable/disable) to help eke out more overclocking headroom.

With Rocket Lake, Intel added support for real-time memory frequency adjustments, though motherboard support will vary by model and vendor. This feature allows you to shift from, say, DDR4-2933 to DDR4-3200 from within Windows 10 without rebooting. 

Now the company has expanded that with Dynamic Memory Boost. This new tech works with both DDR4 and DDR5 and allows the system to dynamically switch between standard memory frequencies and timings and an XMP profile, meaning that it will auto-overclock the memory as needed based on the current usage pattern. And yes, this occurs while the operating system is running and doesn't require a reboot — it's a real-time dynamic adjustment. Intel also continues to support its existing mechanism for live memory timing adjustments from within the operating system, giving users a plethora of on-the-fly memory overclocking options.

Intel has long locked overclocking to its pricey K-series models, while AMD freely allows overclocking with all SKUs on almost any platform. However, we see signs of some improvement here from Intel, as it has now enabled memory overclocking on its B- and H-series chipsets with the 500-series chipsets, and it appears that the same policy will hold true with the 600 series.

AMD's Ryzen 5000 chips come with innovative boost technology that largely consumes most of the available frequency headroom, so as we see with Intel's flagship, there is precious little room for bleeding-edge clock rates. In fact, all-core overclocking with AMD's chips is lackluster; you're often better off using its auto-overclocking Precision Boost Overdrive 2 (PBO2) feature that boosts multi-threaded performance. AMD also has plenty of Curve Optimization features that leverage undervolting to increase boost activity.

In contrast, Intel's Alder Lake chips seem to be constrained by heat output — we obtained a 5.2-GHz overclock on the P-cores and a 4.0 GHz overclock on the E-cores with DDR5 locked in at DDR5-5200. We're sure a better cooler would allow us to push even further, though it would come with an unacceptable increase in power consumption. However, chip quality can vary for both vendors, so these values should serve as a general indicator of possible overclocking headroom.

Winner: Tie

Both platforms have a wealth of tunable parameters for enthusiasts, their respective overclocking advantages, and a suite of both auto-overclocking and software utilities. There's also still room for a sizeable performance boost from overclocking the core, fabric, and memory, meaning this contest will often boil down to personal preference.

Power Consumption, Efficiency, and Cooling: Intel Core i9-12900K vs Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X 

Intel's Core i9-12900K is far more power efficient, meaning it draws less power for each unit of work done, than its predecessor. Yes, Alder Lake still sucks more power than AMD's Ryzen 5000 series chips, but the Intel 7 process marks a big improvement over the old power-guzzling 14nm Rocket Lake chips — we measured a peak of 238W with the 12900K, while the previous-gen 11900K drew nearly 100W more during the same Blender workload. 

Alder Lake is also much faster than its predecessor, earning it some leeway. As you can see in our renders-per-day measurements, the Core i9-12900K and 12600K are both twice as efficient as their predecessors, which is impressive. 

Overall, Intel has reduced its power consumption from meme-worthy to an acceptable level. The Core i9-12900K ran just fine with our 280mm liquid cooler, so you should budget for an equivalent or better water or air cooler.

The last four slides in the above album tell quite a bit about Intel's improved power efficiency. In these charts, we calculate the cumulative amount of energy required to perform the workloads. We plot this 'task energy' value in Kilojoules on the left side of the chart. These workloads are comprised of a fixed amount of work, so we can plot the task energy against the time required to finish the job (bottom axis), thus generating a really useful power chart. 

Bear in mind that faster compute times, and lower task energy requirements, are ideal. That means processors that fall the closest to the bottom left corner of those charts are best. It's easy to see that Intel has made a massive generational improvement here.  

However, AMD still holds the advantage in all of the key power criteria, with the Ryzen 5000 models retaining the crown of the most efficient desktop CPUs that we've ever tested.

Winner: AMD

Intel has made plenty of progress, but AMD still holds the crown of the most power-efficient chips. Not only do they suck less peak power, but they also accomplish more work per unit of power consumed. That results in an across-the-board win in power consumption, efficiency, and thermal output, so you'll end up with a cooler and quieter system. None of the chips in our faceoff come with a bundled cooler, but you'll need a beefier cooler to contain the Core i9-12900K than you will for the Ryzen processors. 

Pricing: Intel Core i9-12900K vs Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X 

The Core i9-12900K comes with a boatload of performance for its $598 price tag, and you can even go graphics-less to save some coin with the $564 Core i9-12900KF model. That's exceptionally competitive pricing against AMD's ~$549 Ryzen 9 5900X that trails the 12900K in every meaningful benchmark, and also against the $799 Ryzen 9 5950X that scores shockingly few (narrow) wins against the 12900K. (Notably, you can find the 5900X on sale for around $524 at times, and Microcenter has had sales for $499.)

Platform pricing comes into play, though, and there are a lot of caveats with a Core i9-12900K-powered system. Naturally, DDR5 memory is the elephant in the room, but that equation is pretty simple: You should expect to pay a massive early adopter premium for DDR5 memory, and more for the higher-end DDR5 motherboards. As such, if you're planning on going the DDR5 route, you should plan to pay handsomely — DDR5 memory is mostly out of stock or up to 50% more expensive than DDR4. If you choose to build a DDR5-equipped system, expect the extra costs to outweigh what you would pay for a 5900X-powered system, and possibly a 5950X system, too. If you're looking for bang-for-the-buck, DDR5 is off the table for now (hopefully prices will recede soon). 

Luckily, DDR4 offers nearly the same performance in the majority of workloads. So if you aren't after professional-class (i.e., time equals money) performance in workloads that benefit from DDR5, like professional video editing applications and the like, DDR4 will more than suffice for an Alder Lake system. These systems will be built on Z690 motherboards for now, as Intel hasn't released the B- or H-series chipsets yet. However, while plenty of high-end Z690 motherboards support DDR5, most (if not all) of the DDR4-compatible Z690 boards land in the lower- to mid-ranges of the Z690 stack. 

It's still a bit early to get the complete picture on motherboard pricing, Alder Lake launched just this week, and we're seeing the normal spotty availability, but here are a few like-for-like comparisons (pricing is valid only at the time of publication):

As you can see, we're looking at price deltas that range from $26 to $55 between the X570 and Z690 DDR4 motherboards, with the latter being more expensive. Of course, you'll have to add in those costs if you plan to build around the 12900K. However, given that AMD's AM4 ecosystem is more robust due to B- and H-series availability, you can even step down a bit further for a 5900X or 5950X-based system. 

However, there are a lot of intangibles at play. Generally, we would expect a Core i9-12900K chip and DDR4 motherboard to cost roughly $100 more than a Ryzen 9 5900X on a similar board, and ~$75 to $100 less than a Ryzen 9 5950X combo with similar trimmings. 

Winner: Tie 

Intel Core i9-12900K systems outfitted with DDR5 memory will come at a big premium that might not be worth the slim performance gains over DDR4 in most applications. Given the early state of DDR5 availability, it's hard to nail down firm estimates. However, the high pricing of DDR5 isn't worth it for most users, which removes one of the key reasons to go with an Alder Lake system. 

Given the additional connectivity you gain with the Z690 platform, not to mention the performance advantages of the chip, Intel's Core i9-12900K comes out ahead if you're building around a DDR4-based system. Core i9-12900K platforms built around DDR4 memory should be more expensive than a similar system than a Ryzen 9 5900X, and slightly less expensive than the Ryzen 9 5950X. Factoring in the Core i9-12900K's exceptional performance and more modern chipset with advanced connectivity options, it wins the pricing war for DDR4-based systems. That yields a tie in this section. 

Bottom Line 

The Core i9-12900K vs Ryzen 9 5900X and 5950X battle ends in a five to three win in Intel's favor. It might seem odd that we put the Core i9-12900K up against both the Ryzen 9 5900X and 5950X, especially with the latter being around $200 more expensive, but that's because the 12900K has the performance chops to challenge both chips. As such, we expect AMD to reduce pricing soon, perhaps bringing 5950X pricing closer to the 12900K.

Software updates should help resolve many of the early issues in Windows 10, but you might need to engage in some manual tweaking for some specific programs. However, despite those early hiccups with Windows 10, Intel's gamble to adopt a hybrid x86 architecture has clearly paid off.

The Core i9-12900K lands at $589 for the full-featured model and $564 for the graphics-less variant. The 12900K delivers incredible performance in threaded workloads, often rivaling or beating the $799 Ryzen 9 5950X, but at a much lower price point. Yes, the Ryzen 9 5950X does beat the 12900K in some threaded work, but by surprisingly slim deltas given its higher pricing. Additionally, the 12900K beats the ~$499 to $549 Ryzen 9 5900X in all performance metrics. If you're looking for snappy performance in lighter fare, the 12900K is also the uncontested leader in x86 single-threaded performance, bar none.

The Core i9-12900K is the fastest gaming chip on the planet, regardless of if you use Windows 10 or 11 or DDR4 or DDR5. AMD will fire back with its 3D V-Cache processors that will come with up to 192MB of L3 cache per chip, which the company says imparts up to 15% more gaming performance. Those chips arrive next year, but the impact on gaming beyond eSports titles is unknown.

Alder Lake's advantages also include platform connectivity, but DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 interfaces will add some cost in the early days. Support for DDR4 can help reduce that overhead, but we haven't seen any flagship DDR4 motherboards yet; the highest-end models appear to be confined to DDR5. Luckily, you won't need expensive DDR5 memory to unlock the best gaming performance — unless you have a very specific need for DDR5, it's probably best to skip it until it matures further.

Intel's very aggressive pricing gives it the overall lead against AMD's competing Ryzen 5000 chips, at least if you're building a DDR4 system. The competitive pricing could also take some of the sting out of the high platform costs associated with the Z690 motherboards that are currently the only option for Alder Lake systems. If you're going with a DDR5 build, prepare yourself for eye-watering pricing, at least until supply improves. Eventually, we'll see B- and H-series motherboards come to market, which should help reduce platform costs.

AMD still holds the power and efficiency crown, but the 12900K's new 'Intel 7' process reduces power consumption by up to a third and nearly doubles power efficiency, reducing AMD's massive advantage in that key area. Overall, if we take performance into account, Intel has reduced its power consumption from meme-worthy to an acceptable level.

Overall, the Core i9-12900K marks a massive generational leap forward for Intel in nearly all facets, including gaming, performance in lightly- and heavily-threaded work, power consumption and efficiency, and platform connectivity options. Paired with aggressive pricing, the Core i9-12900K wins the faceoff with the Ryzen 9 5900X and 5950X in convincing fashion. 

• MORE: Best CPUs for Gaming
• MORE: CPU Benchmark Hierarchy
• MORE: AMD vs Intel
• MORE: All CPUs Content

Intel's 12th Generation Core 'Alder Lake' processors are not yet available commercially, but enthusiasts who managed to lay their hands on these CPUs are already experimenting with overclocking. A Chinese enthusiast this week overclocked his Core i9-12900K to 5.20 GHz on all high-performance cores and managed to leave behind AMD's Ryzen flagship in a multi-threaded test. However, Alder Lake is a very power-hungry beast at 5.20 GHz. 

Overclocking Intel's hybrid 12th Generation Core processors will be somewhat different from overclocking 'traditional' CPUs as enthusiasts will want to increase clock speeds of high-performance Golden Cove cores while keeping energy-efficient Gracemont cores at stock speeds. Apparently, the unlocked Core i9-12900K CPU coupled with enthusiast-grade Intel Z690-based platform support an overclocking setting that allows to overclock only Golden Cove cores and leave Gracemont cores intact, according to a Chinese enthusiast who has a blog at Bilibili (via VideoCardz).

In a bid to overclock high-performance cores of the Core i9-12900K CPU to 5.20 GHz (from 3.20 GHz base and from 5.0 GHz all-core boost), the enthusiast had to increase core voltage all the way to 1.385 Volts at which point power consumption of the chip skyrocketed to 330W (up from stock PL1 value of 125W), though he did not disclose how he measured power consumption. 

But at 5.20 GHz, Intel's Core i9-12900K can score 851 points in the CPU-Z single-threaded benchmark as well as 11986.9 points in CPU-Z multi-thread benchmark. By contrast, AMD's flagship Ryzen 5950X CPU scores 648 and 11906, respectively. Unfortunately, it was not revealed which OS and what kind of memory was used with the Alder Lake CPU. Previously, the Core i9-12900K beat the Ryzen 9 5950X in Geekbench.

Overclocking hardware ahead of launch should always be taken with a bit of skepticism. First up, we do not know whether we are dealing with pre-release or commercial hardware (we are talking both about the CPU and about the motherboard). Secondly, we have no idea whether commercial hardware will support the same capabilities as pre-release hardware. Thirdly, in this particular case, exact hardware and software configurations were not revealed. Finally, benchmarks like CPU-Z do not necessarily reflect real-world performance.

Intel's 12th Generation Alder Lake processors will soon see the light of day this Fall 2021. It appears that the flagship Core i9-12900K (via HXL) may give AMD's Ryzen 9 5950X a run for its money in gaming, according to the latest Ashes of the Singularity benchmarks. The hybrid chip had previously bested the Ryzen 9 5950X in Geekbench 5, too.

Thanks to early retailer listings, the Core i9-12900K's specifications are already out there. The Alder Lake processor is expected to wield 16 cores in total, eight high performance Golden Cove cores and eight energy-efficient Gracemont cores. The 125W chip's other specifications include 30MB of L3 cache, a 3.2 GHz base clock and 5.2 GHz boost clock.

AMD's Ryzen 9 5950X, on the other hand, sports 16 Zen 3 cores with simultaneous multithreading (SMT) at 3.4 GHz with a boost clock speed of 4.9 GHz. The 105W processor also has 64MB of L3 cache at its disposal. On paper, AMD's chip seems to have the advantage since it's working with full-fledged Zen 3 cores whereas the Core i9-12900K has to work with just eight Golden Cove cores.

At the time of writing, there were 11 Core i9-12900K submissions in the Ashes of the Singularity database. The benchmark doesn't expose the complete specifications for the graphics card so we're unsure if the Core i9-12900K and GeForce RTX 3080 waere overclocked or whether they were under exotic cooling or not. Take the results with a pinch of salt. Furthemore, we don't know whether the user tested on Windows 11. Remember that Microsoft's next-generation operating system comes with an improved scheduler that's particularly optimized for Alder Lake.

The Core i9-12900K with a GeForce RTX 3080 scored 14,000 points with the High 1440p preset. By contrast, the Ryzen 9 5950X and a GeForce RTX 3080 scored 10,100 points with the same graphics preset and resolution. The Core i9-12900K outperformed the Ryzen 9 5950X by 38.6%. Both systems were using version 3.10.191346.0 of the benchmark tool so it should be a fair apples-to-apples comparison. Nevertheless, we have to highlight that fact that it's improbable that both users are using the same GeForce RTX 3080 so the actual performance margin between the Core i9-12900K and Ryzen 9 5950X could be bigger or smaller.

Despite its heterogeneous nature, the Core i9-12900K appears to pack a punch. However, Ashes of the Singularity is just one benchmark so it's too early to declare a winner. It'll be interesting to see whether the Core i9-12900K can recover the gaming throne for Intel as AMD practically has the best CPUs for gaming right now.

Gaming is good and all, but the Core i9-12900K has a tougher job ahead of it. The Alder Lake chip will have to prove whether it can hang with AMD's Zen 3 core-heavy Ryzen desktop chips in terms of application performance, which is more important for many consumers.

Alder Lake will launch this Fall 2021, but there are strong rumors that an announcement is allegedly scheduled for the Intel Innovation event, which runs from October 27 to 28.

AMD’s long-awaited Ryzen 5000 line of processors has finally launched, and like the RTX 3000 launch before it, the CPUs sold out almost instantly at launch. Unlike Nvidia with its RTX 3000 graphics cards, though, AMD quickly promised more stock to come soon. That's already come to fruition for lots of the Ryzen 5000 line, though the situation differs from chip to chip.

Also, different stores all have different approaches to selling AMD’s hottest new processors, including AMD's own store. Since we might see even more stock coming in the future, let’s run through America’s major component retailers to get you ready to buy AMD's new chips as soon as they become available again.  

 AMD Ryzen 5 5600X: Where to Buy

US Ryzen 5 5600X retailers at a glance: AMD I Amazon I Newegg I B&H I Best Buy | Micro Center

US Ryzen 5 5600X resellers at a glance: eBay

The Ryzen 5 5600X is the most affordable of the Ryzen 5000 processors and has 6 cores/12 threads of power with base/boost speeds of 3.7/4.6 GHz and a 35MB cache. It’s also the only Ryzen 5000 CPU to come with an included Wraith Stealth cooler, as AMD no longer packs coolers with CPUs that draw over 65W in power. With a $299 MSRP, it was easy for bots to snatch up at launch without much of an overhead cost, but stock has since heavily recovered.

The Ryzen 5 5600X is currently in stock at most stores, including Amazon, Newegg, Best Buy, B&H and even AMD's own website. It's also on sale at some sites, with the cheapest price we could find being $272 at Amazon and Newegg.

Microcenter also has stock, but it's limited depending on location and can only be purchased in-store. You can check if your local store has stock here.

Be wary when checking stock on Amazon and Newegg, though. Among the official listings, there's also inflated prices from third party sellers.
 

AMD Ryzen 7 5800X: Where to Buy

US Ryzen 7 5800X retailers at a glance: AMD I Amazon I Newegg I B&H I Best Buy | Micro Center

US Ryzen 7 5800X resellers at a glance: eBay

The Ryzen 7 5800X is, according to numbers from Scan UK, what might be the most popular Ryzen 5000 series chip (although that’s only one retailer). Its 8 core/ 16 thread core count and 3.8 / 4.7 GHz base / boost clock make it an appealing choice given its $449 MSRP, not to mention its 36MB cache.

Luckily, this CPU is currently in stock at most stores. It's also on sale at many stores, with its cheapest price right now being $394 at Amazon.

AMD also has stock if you want to buy directly, but you won't get any discounts.

Microcenter has limited availability in some stores, but you can only buy your processor in person.  You can check your local store for stock here.

AMD Ryzen 9 5900X: Where to Buy

US Ryzen 9 5900X retailers at a glance: AMD I Amazon I Newegg I B&H I Best Buy | Micro Center

US Ryzen 9 5900X resellers at a glance: eBay

The Ryzen 9 5900X is where the Ryzen 5000 CPU series starts to get premium. It’s got 12 cores/ 24 threads and 3.7 / 4.8 GHz clock speeds all for $549. It’s also got a 70MB cache, as opposed to the 35 and 36MB caches on the 5600X and 5800X, respectively.

Among official retailers, the Ryzen 9 5900X is technically only in stock at AMD's own store right now. Antonline does have Amazon and Newegg third-party listings for it, though, but the Amazon listing is $10 more than the ones on Newegg or AMD's own site.

Microcenter is promising limited in-store availability depending on location. You can check your local store here.

AMD Ryzen 9 5950X: Where to Buy

US Ryzen 9 5950X retailers at a glance: AMD I Amazon I Newegg I B&H I Best Buy | Micro Center

US Ryzen 9 5950X resellers at a glance: eBay

Finally, the Ryzen 9 5950X is the most premium Ryzen 5000 CPU available. It’s got 16 cores / 32 threads and clock speeds of 3.4 / 4.9 GHz, plus a 72MB cache. All of that comes at a $799 MSRP.

All the usual official retailers currently have this chip in stock, aside from Amazon. They're also all selling it for $749, aside from AMD's own store, which is still keeping the $799 pricing.

Microcenter's stock depends on your location, which you can check here.

Even with the overall better stock situation, AMD is promising more Ryzen 5000 CPU stock to come in soon. Bots might eat that up first as well, but hopefully now you’re a little more prepared to strike as soon as new deals come in.  

As Intel is gearing up to start sales of its 12th Generation Core 'Alder Lake' processors sometime in October (at least according to Noctua), the company is sending out samples of these CPUs to a wide range of its OEM customers, which is why it is inevitable that benchmark results will leak. This week we already saw Intel's Core i7-12700 Geekbenched, now it is time for the company's flagship Core i9-12900K chip to show its potential in Geekbench 5. Surprisingly, it outperforms AMD's beastly Ryzen 9 5950X in threaded work. 

Intel's Core i9-12900K processor is meant to have all the advantages that the Alder Lake architecture has to offer, including eight high-performance Golden Cove cores (P-cores) with Hyper-Threading and eight energy-efficient Goldmont (E-cores) equipped with a 30MB L3 cache and operating at high clock speeds. The final frequencies of the Core i9-12900K chip are unknown, but if a recent Geekbench 5 database entry is to be believed, the CPU will have a 3.20 GHz base clock rate. For some reason, the benchmark could not determine the maximum Turbo frequency of the chip, but we believe that it is at or above the 5.0 GHz mark. 

Just like with the Core i7-12700 earlier this week, we are not going to compare the overall single-thread and multi-thread scores of Alder Lake in Geekbench 5 (due to the unfairly overweighted impact of crypto performance in the benchmark and a lack of AVX-512 support in Alder Lake), but focus on integer and float performance. 

As it turns out, the upcoming Core i9-12900K packs quite the punch. It outperforms all contemporary top-of-the-range CPUs from Intel, AMD, and Apple in single-threaded integer and single-threaded floating point workload. As a result, the new CPU not only leaves behind its rival from the red camp but even beats Apple's M1, which is known for its single-threaded performance because of its 'wide' execution pipeline. Of course, the Alder Lake has a massive L3 cache and microarchitectural advantages and consumes much more power, but its single-thread results are still very impressive. 

Yet, the Core i9-12900K truly shines in multi-threaded workloads. Since the CPU packs in 16 cores in total and can process up to 24 threads at once, it naturally smashes Intel's eight-core Core i9-11900K and Apple's hybrid eight-core M1 SoC. Thus, it's remarkable that it beats AMD's 16-core Ryzen 9 5950X (which can execute 32 threads) in integer multi-threaded workloads but loses by 107 points in floating point multi-threaded workloads.

While the performance of the Core i9-12900K in Geekbench 5 looks quite remarkable, keep in mind that we are dealing with pre-production hardware, and some things may change. In any case, take these results with a grain of salt for now. 

It may be that time of the year again when AMD starts refreshing its Ryzen processors if Twitter user Patrick Schur's information is accurate. There is a precedent of AMD refreshing its Ryzen processors, nevertheless, we recommend you approach the news with caution.

Unless AMD pulls a rabbit out of its hat, the new Ryzen 5000 (Vermeer) processors will in all likelihood acquire the XT moniker, following in the footsteps of the prior Ryzen 3000 XT-series. Everything should remain unchanged under the hood. The processors will continue to come out of TSMC's 7nm oven and arrive with the same, powerful Zen 3 cores that bring an impressive 19% IPC uplift.

AMD's last refresh has shown us that the amount of cores, L3 cache and TDP (thermal design power) limits remain intact. Instead, the refreshed Ryzen 5000 chips will likely offer marginal boost clock speed improvements. Once again, the chips will slot into the AM4 socket so existing AMD motherboards should only require a small and simple firmware upgrade to leverage the fresh Ryzen parts.

AMD Ryzen 5000 XT Specifications

*Specifications are unconfirmed.

Schur referred to the two mysterious Ryzen processors as being the B2 stepping for Vermeer. There are two codenames that are being thrown around. Given the specifications, the 100-000000059-60_50/34_Y is probably the Ryzen 9 5950XT, while the 100-000000065-06_46/37_Y likely alludes to the Ryzen 5 5600XT. Assuming that AMD follows the same path as the previous XT-series, we should see a Ryzen 7 5800XT as well. However, that might not be the case. AMD skipped the Ryzen 9 3950X last time, and it appears that the chip maker might give the Ryzen 9 5950X the XT treatment this time around. AMD is clearly switching things up.

The Ryzen 9 5950XT may just arrive with a 5 GHz boost clock, 100 MHz higher than the standard Ryzen 9 5950X. The thing is that many Ryzen 9 5950X samples can already reach or surpass the 5 GHz barrier through AMD's Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO) technology. Therefore, we're unsure how the Ryzen 9 5950XT would fit in the picture. Furthermore, Schur listed the Ryzen 5 5600XT chip with a 4.6 GHz boost clock, which is the same for the existing Ryzen 5 5600X. These are probably specifications for early engineering samples, though, so don't take them to heart.

AMD launched its Ryzen 3000 XT-series lineup last year in the month of June. If the chipmaker respects the same time frame, then we could see the Ryzen 5000 XT-series as early as next month. If we were betting men, the processor launch would possibly be accompanied by the X570S motherboard announcement.

Michael Driscoll, the creator of a script that scrapes sold items on eBay, has shared his latest market analysis on the Ryzen 5000 (codename Vermeer) scalping situation. Given their place on the top of our best CPUs and CPU benchmarks, it's no surprise. Although pricing has stabilized over the past month, AMD's chips are still selling for well over their MSRP.

In a quick summary, Driscoll confirmed that scalpers have sold a grand total of 8,729 Zen 3 processors on eBay alone. To put the number into perspective, it's equivalent to $5,880,472 in sales. The data showed that scalpers made up to $946,259 in earnings from flipping Zen 3 processors on eBay. Nonetheless, the scalpers weren't the only party benefiting from sales as eBay and PayPal raked in a juicy profit of $625,665 as well.

In terms of sheer volume, the Ryzen 5 5600X was the easiest Zen 3 chip to move for scalpers, thanks to the hexa-core part's lower price tag. Driscoll's numbers revealed that scalpers sold up to 3,204 pieces of Ryzen 5 5600X with a participation of 36.7% in the total number of sold processors on eBay. If we look at lucrativeness, however, the Ryzen 9 5900X is the real belle of the ball. Despite only selling 1,962 units, the Ryzen 9 5900X helped scalpers make up to $459,256, which equals to 48.5% of the total profit.

AMD Ryzen 5000 Sales at eBay

Driscoll noted that the pricing for Ryzen 5000 processors has improved over the course of the previous month, but it's far from returning to normal. Currently, the Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X are still 40% more expensive than their respective MSRPs. The Ryzen 7 5800X typically sells for 25% over its MSRP, while the Ryzen 5 5600X costs 30% more than its MSRP. In the case of the latter, Driscoll hightlighted a slight descend in its pricing trend.

Whether you consider scalpers as entrepreneurs or not, they have started to expand their horizons past eBay. Apparently, scalpers have taken their business to another venue, more specifically StockX. It certainly seems like an unorthodox marketplace to sell a processor since StockX is more widely known for stuff like sneakers, streetwear and bags. However, StockX only has a 3% selling fee, making it a lot more appealing than eBay that wants 13% of your profit.

AMD Ryzen 5000 Sales at StockX

Admittedly, the sample size at StockX is still pretty small since scalpers have only sold 805 units of Zen 3 chips so far, distributed between the Ryzen 9 5900X and Ryzen 9 5950X. The general tendency remains the same though, and it's that the Ryzen 9 5900X continues to be the moneymaker for scalpers. 

Furthermore, scalpers are reselling Ryzen 5000 processors on StockX at lower prices due to the smaller fee. For comparison, the average price for the Ryzen 9 5900X on StockX is $758, while the median price for the same processor on eBay is $800.

Lamentably, the repercussions of the Ryzen 5000 scalping mess have trickled down to AMD's previous generations of Ryzen desktop processors. Driscoll discovered that Zen+ and Zen 2 processors have generally increased in price by approximately 33% and 25%, respectively. More explicitly, the Ryzen 3 3100 and Ryzen 3 3300X saw a rise in prices up to 45%. Consumers are potentially picking up cheap Ryzen processors as a stopgap solution until the Ryzen 5000 chips get back in stock at retailers. Zen pricing, on the other hand, remains unaffected.

Asus’ TUF Gaming X570-Pro WiFi is one of the cheaper X570 options available, giving it an early edge as it vies for a spot on our best motherboards list. At $219.99, the board includes a capable VRM that handled our power-hungry AMD Ryzen 9 5950X at stock speeds and while overclocked. In our testing suite, the board performed OK, on average running slightly slower than the other boards, though there were few significant outliers on either side of average.

At the time of publishing, the matured Asus X570 lineup includes options from the TUF, Prime, Strix, WS (Workstation), and ROG lines, a total of 14 boards. Since we last checked, Asus added a Mini-ITX option, which was the only form-factor missing. Today, the product stack consists of a wide variety of motherboards in varying sizes, feature sets, and price points. There is likely something for everyone in the company’s X570 lineup.

Digging down into the performance results, we saw slightly below average scores/times in long-running CPU heavy multi-threaded tests such as Cinebench, Handbrake, POV-Ray and Corona. The PCMark 10 suite was on the opposite side of things, generally running as fast or faster than most other boards we’ve tested. The TUF Gaming X570 Pro WiFi showed promising results in synthetic tests and actual games. Overall, performance isn’t a concern, though if you plan on getting a Ryzen 9 5950X and beating on all cores and threads, there are better performing (but higher-priced) options out of the box.

Outside of performance, the board sports dual PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 sockets, eight SATA ports, 2.5 GbE and integrated WiFi 6, premium Realtek audio, TUF components, and more. The board’s styling is pretty simple, with all-black PCB and parts, outside of some TUF highlighting. Some may enjoy the look, others not so much. You’ll find RGB LED lighting onboard, but only a small portion to the right of the chipset heatsink. Read on for more details about the X570-Pro WiFi, including more features and performance testing.

Specifications - Asus TUF Gaming X570-Pro Wi-Fi

Inside the retail packaging, you’ll find several accessories including SATA cables, a support DVD, and more. The included accessory stack isn’t big, but has most of what you need to get started. Below is a complete list of all the extras inside the box. 

●      I/O shield

●      (2) SATA cables

●      M.2 screw package

●      Support DVD

●      Asus dual-band WiFI Antennas

●      TUF Gaming sticker

●      TUF certification card(s)

●      M.2 rubber package(s)

After removing the TUF Gaming X570-Pro WiFi from the box, you’ll see a black/dark grey motherboard with a few yellow highlights noting the TUF branding. A stenciled pattern starts around the chipset heatsink and ending around the VRM area. All sockets and slots are also black and grey. Overall, the styling is simple and will fit in with most builds. However, it doesn’t jump out at you like a classic good-looking board, so some may not like its rugged appearance.

On the RGB side of things, Asus has a small strip to the chipset heatsink’s right that matches the grey stenciled pattern. The RGB colors are saturated, but the small strip isn’t terribly bright. If the integrated lighting isn’t enough, there are three headers for expansion. The Asus Aura application handles lighting control.

Looking at the top half of the motherboard, one of the first things that jumps out to me is the large heatsinks that cover the VRM. The black heatsinks reach out to cover part of the rear IO area and other undesirable bits on the motherboard. An 8-pin EPS connector (required) and a 4-pin EPS connector (optional) deliver power to the CPU. The area around the socket is relatively busy with many capacitors close to the mounts, but this is nothing to worry about. Just to the right of the socket are four DRAM slots that support up to 128GB of DDR4 RAM with speeds listed up to a smoking-fast 5100+ MHz +(OC).

Above the DRAM slots are the first two (of six) fan/pump headers. All six of these headers support a maximum of 1A/12W. All headers except for the AIO_PUMP are Q-Fan controlled and adjustable. The CPU_FAN and CPU_OPT headers in this area automatically detect if the connected fan is DC or PWM controlled. The rest of the headers will need to be manually selected. No matter what price point, I would like to see all fan headers automatically adjust to the right control method. Additionally, there are two more fan headers on the top half of the board. These chassis fan connectors are located just below the left VRM heatsink above the top PCIe slot.

Immediately to the right of the fan headers up top is the first RGB header. In this case, it’s a 4pin RGB with the 3-pin ARGB header located to the right of the socket area. Located just above the 3-pin RGB header is the Asus Q-LED area. Q-LED consists of four LEDs on board that light up during the POST process. If the board hangs on the DRAM, CPU, VGA, or boot devices, the corresponding LED remains lit, telling you at a high level why the board won’t POST. Without a two-character debug LED, the Q-LED is a valuable tool for troubleshooting POST issues.

Just below the Q-LEDs and 3-pin RGB header is the 24-pin ATX connector for sending power to the motherboard and the front panel USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-C front panel header.

The Asus webpage for the TUF Gaming X570 Pro lists a 12+2 configuration for the Vcore and SOC, which at a high level bodes well for handling our Ryzen 9 5950X. Managing power sent to the MOSFETs is the Asus Digi+ chip (ASP1106GGQW at X+Y = 6). The six-channel controller works in a 4+1 ‘teamed’ setup. This VRM configuration from Asus does away with phase doublers, sending the power to three 50A Vishay SIC639 Dr. MOS MOSFETs each. The 600A available for Vcore is plenty for our CPU at stock and ambient overclocking. 

Sliding down to the bottom half of the board, we’ll start with the audio section on the left side. At first look, you should see a Faraday cage with the TUF symbol on it, covering the Realtek ALC S1200A codec. Just below the codec are five premium black and yellow Nichicon audio caps. We won’t find the flagship codec or op-amps on lower-priced X570 boards, but the high-end audio codec should be sufficient for most users.

In the middle of the board you’ll find two full-length PCIe slots and two x1 size slots. The primary GPU slot (top slot) is reinforced with the Asus Safeslot said to provide additional retention and shearing resistance while the bottom is not. The top slot is fed from the CPU and offers PCIe 4.0 x16 bandwidth, with the second full-length slot fed from the chipset with four PCIe 4.0 lanes. The two short x1 slots get their lanes from the chipset, each running at PCIe 4.0 x1 speeds.

Just above the primary video card slot is the first M.2 socket. The second socket is located toward the bottom of the board and has a heatsink. Both M.2 sockets support PCIe 4.0 x4- and SATA-based modules, offering more flexibility than some boards that only run PCIe based modules only in the second/third slot. Worth noting: only the bottom slot includes a simple heatsink. If you’re running a PCIe 4.0 NVMe-based drive, you’ll likely want to use that socket unless your module comes with a heatsink.

Finally, to the right of the PCIe/M.2 area is the chipset heatsink and fan. The chipset fan was virtually inaudible at default settings, so there is nothing to worry about there. On the right edge, we spy four of the eight SATA ports. The SATA ports support RAID0, 1 and 10 modes.

Across the board’s bottom are several headers and even a few SATA ports. You won’t find any buttons here. Below is the full list, from left to right:

●      Front panel audio

●      COM port

●      COM debug

●      CLR CMOS

●      4-pin chassis fan header

●      (2) USB 2.0 ports

●      USB 3.2 Gen1 port

●      4-pin chassis fan header

●      (4) SATA ports

●      RGB header

●      Front panel header

Swinging around back to the rear IO, the TUF Gaming X570 Plus WiFi doesn’t include an integrated IO plate, so you’ll have to install it. There are seven USB ports out back,one USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-C, four USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports and two USB 3.2 Gen1 ports. I’d like to see a couple more USB portshere, as some users could struggle with seven. Outside of that is a clear CMOS button, a legacy PS/2 port, and DisplayPort/HDMI outputs for the integrated video. Last are the WiFi antenna connections and a 5-plug audio stack with SPDIF. 

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Software

Asus has several applications designed for various functions, ranging from RGB lighting control, audio, system monitoring, overclocking and more. Instead of plodding through each application as if it changes for each review, moving forward, we’ll capture several screenshots of a few major utilities. In this case, here’s a look at Ai Suite 3, Armory Crate, and the Realtek Audio application.

Firmware

Like the software section above, we’ve shortened the Firmware section as well. Instead of describing each section, we’ve gathered screenshots covering the vast majority of the bios screens. If there is anything of interest, we’ll make a note of it.

I’ve been a longtime fan of the Asus UEFIs as they are easy to get around, have a lot of options, and the most frequently accessed items are not buried deep within the menus. The BIOS is high-contrast and easy to read, too. The EZ Mode provides enough information and options to be useful, while the Advanced part of the BIOS has everything you need, and more, to tweak your motherboard and components.

Test System / Comparison Products

We’ve updated our test system to Windows 10 64-bit OS (20H2) with all threat mitigations applied. We also upgraded our video card driver to 457.30 and reran all the game tests moving to the new 5000 series CPU. We use the latest non-beta motherboard BIOS available to the public unless otherwise noted. The hardware used is as follows :

Benchmark Settings

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Our standard benchmarks and power tests are performed using the CPU’s stock frequencies (including stock Thermal Velocity Boost), with all power-saving features enabled. We set optimized defaults in the BIOS and set the memory set using the XMP profiles. For this baseline testing, Windows is set to High Performance before we switch over to Balanced during power testing, so the PC idles appropriately.

Synthetic Benchmarks

Synthetics are a great tool to figure out if a board runs out of spec, as identical settings should produce similar performance results. Advanced memory timings are the one place where motherboard makers can still optimize for either stability or performance, though, and those settings can impact some testing.

In our synthetic benchmarks, the Asus TUF Gaming X570-Pro WiFi performed well in these tests, leaning on the faster side of results in 7Zip and PCMark 10 suite, but a bit slower than most in Cinebench. There is nothing concerning here.

Timed Applications

LAME testing showed the TUF board on the slower side of average, just behind the venerable Godlike. That said, all LAME results are within fractions of a percent of each other, with times ranging from 11.72 to 12.19. The TUF board ran at 11.99 seconds. In our Corona benchmark, the TUF Gaming Pro finished in 47 seconds, where the rest are 46 or 45 seconds. In Handbrake, x264, the TUF Gaming was a couple of seconds slower than the rest of the tested boards, while the x265 testing showed it right in the middle again. 

3D Games and 3DMark

We’ve updated our game tests to The Division 2 and Forza Horizon 4. We run the games at 1920x1080 resolution using the Ultra preset. As the resolution goes up, the CPU tends to have less impact. The goal with these settings is to determine if there are differences in performance at the most commonly used resolution with settings most people use or at least strive for.

We saw appreciable gains during our gaming tests when moving from the 3900X to the newer 5950X. Between the clock speeds, IPC and large cache differences, performance increased using this CPU at our 1080p test resolution. If you game at a higher resolution, chances are you won’t see those gains unless you’re using one of the new, ultra-fast Nvidia or AMD GPUs. Disclaimer aside, our Asus TUF Gaming X570 Pro WiFi had no problems here, easily mixing in with the rest of the newly tested boards in both 3DMark and actual games. It matched the fastest results we’ve seen in both games and popped the highest score in Fire Strike Extreme (2nd fastest in Time Spy). Overall, this board turned in an excellent result for game testing.

Power Consumption / VRM Temperatures

We used AIDA64’s System Stability Test with Stress CPU, FPU and Cache enabled for power testing, using the peak power consumption value. The wattage reading is from the wall via a Kill-A-Watt meter to capture the entire ecosystem. The only variable that changes is the motherboard; all other parts are the same.

The Asus TUF Gaming X570 Pro used 68 Watts from the wall at idle, the lowest value we’ve seen so far. Load wattage peaked at just 205W, also the least amount of power used among all X570 boards we’ve tested so far. When we average that out, the 137W value is the lowest we’ve seen when testing a 5950X, while the average was lower than testing with 3900X.

The 12-phase 50A VRMs handled our CPU testing without issue. At stock speeds, the hottest probe on our Exetech peaked at 46 degrees Celsius (Hwinfo did not read the VRM temperatures on the board). After overclocking our Ryzen 9 5950X CPU to 4.4 GHz and ~1.3V, VRM temperatures peaked around 57 degrees Celsius for the Extech sensors. Compared to the other boards tested, the temperatures here are some of the coolest around. This VRM can handle the flagship CPU at stock and while overclocked. 

Overclocking

There are several ways to overclock on AMD platforms, depending on your goals. If your focus is single-threaded performance, you may want to focus on using Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO) and adjusting its parameters. If you can use all cores and threads, setting a manual CPU multiplier and voltage is likely the better route. While the latter clips peak single-threaded performance a bit, it increases all core/thread performance over the all-core boost. To that end, we settled on 4.4 GHz at ~1.3V for an all core/thread overclock. 

As you’ve probably figured out by now, the VRMs on the motherboard aren’t holding anything back. Cooling on the CPU is the limiting factor. The TUF Gaming Pro efficiently handled our 16-core/32-thread Ryzen 9 5950X. On the vdroop front, we had to raise the level up to keep things close to what we set in the BIOS.

On the memory side, we know AMD is limited to around 3600/3733 MHz when keeping FCLK at a 1:1 ratio with the memory. With this in mind, we add two more sticks and run 4x8GB at DDR4 3600, which is AMD’s current sweet spot. We didn’t run into any issues on this board. It was a ‘set it and forget it’ experience, which we like to see. 

Final Thoughts

There is a lot to like about the Asus TUF Gaming X570 Pro WiFi. From the lower price point ($219.99) to its ability to handle the power-hungry Ryzen 9 5950X, it presents you with many features with a lot of capabilities. The board includes 2.5 GbE and WiFi 6 for fast networking, two M.2 sockets for ultra-fast storage, and the TUF features, including Safeslot, ESD guards (LAN) DRAM protection and more. Productivity performance on this board was slightly slower on average than the rest in CPU heavy tests, though not substantively.  Haming results, meanwhile show it to be one of the best (though again, negligibly). It appears that with heavier loads running for extended periods, the board runs a couple of boost bins slower, which causes the small differences we’ve seen in performance. Most users would be hard-pressed to notice this difference. However, if you plan to beat on a Ryzen 9 5950X and every second counts, you’ll want to make some adjustments in the BIOS. 

Other competing boards in this space include the Gigabyte X570 Aorus Elite ($199.99), MSI MPG X570 Gaming Edge WiFi ($209.99), and the ASRock X570 Extreme 4 ($239.99). Our Asus lists the fastest memory clocks of these boards and has eight SATA ports along, with the ASRock Extreme 4 (the other boards use six). M.2 counts are the same at two for each board. On the network side, the TUF is the only competing SKU with a 2.5 GbE and Wi-Fi 6. Only the MSI includes Wi-Fi (and it isn’t Wi-Fi 6). That said, its appearance may not be for everyone, but the general style does allow it to fit in with most build themes. 

In the end, the Asus TUF Gaming X570 Pro WiFi is a well-rounded board full of features and capable of handling the flagship 5000 series processor, even when overclocked. As you can see above, this inexpensive motherboard gives you plenty of reasons to get it over similarly priced boards. If you’re looking to build around the X570 chipset on the cheap while using a high-end CPU, the Asus TUF Gaming X570 Pro WiFi should be on your shortlist.

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AMD's Ryzen 5000 chips might have launched back at the start of October, but getting your hands on a chip has proven to be quite the challenge. There have been promises of more stock, but even so, people have been buying the chips faster than AMD can ship them out. 

But, it appears that certain countries in Europe might be in luck. Just now, the Netherlands (via Tweakers.net) received huge shipments of the AMD Ryzen 5 5600X, Ryzen 7 5800X, and the Ryzen 9 5950X, with the more affordable chips available in significantly greater quantities. Interestingly, the Ryzen 9 5900X appears to be still troubled by supply issues, but that could be due to its popularity leading to a large number of pre-orders that still need to be fulfilled before the webshops can offer the chips to the general public with next-day delivery. Germany and surrounding countries appear to have received similar shipments.

Of course, pricing is still a little out of whack, with the 5600X retailing about €370 instead of its European MSRP of €309. The 5800X exchanges hands for about €500. The 5900X isn't widely in stock, but if it were, it would cost between €750 and €850. The god-tier 16-core Ryzen 9 5950X is selling for a mighty €950. Next-day delivery is also a bit of a false promise at this time, but that's more due to a local lockdown and the postal services being overburdened.

What Caused These Shortages Again?

Of course, with everyone stuck at home, demand for PC hardware and any gaming-related hardware, in general, is through the roof, but there's more happening that's causing AMD's shortages. For starters, AMD's foundry partner TSMC is fully at capacity, and it seems one of the issues is that chip packagers can't get their hands on enough interposers. 

Meanwhile, AMD's chips are also simply the Best CPUs you can buy right now, with a new architecture built on the 7nm process. Meanwhile, Intel is still stuck at 14nm, though Rocket Lake-S will bring a new architecture to the process node. No exact release date is known for Intel's chips. Still, when they do launch, considering Intel can price aggressively and has much more production capacity than AMD, chances are Rocket Lake will ease some of the demand off AMD, and the CPU situation will normalize.

Fingers crossed. 

Unfortunately, there's no news about when the US will see similar kinds of Ryzen 5000 shipments.

Previously, we reviewed the least-expensive B550 MicroATX motherboards we could find using the Ryzen 9 3900X CPU. Though some couldn’t handle overclocking, we found that most of these boards had no issues dealing with the then-flagship Ryzen 9 3900X. So what if you want to use the newer Ryzen 9 5950X? For the most part, these boards can handle the new CPU at stock settings, but not PBO or overclocking. For that, you will need to step up a tier. To that end, we’re looking over the Gigabyte B550M Aorus Pro, which has better power delivery, more features, and a slightly higher price tag than entry-level B550 boards. Will it make our best B550 motherboards list?

The B550M Aorus Pro includes four SATA ports, a gigabit LAN port, two M.2 sockets (one with a heatsink), a solid audio section, and of course, a VRM said to be able to handle the 5950X. Compared to its little brother, the Gigabyte B550M DS3H, the Aorus Po has better audio, more USB ports and more robust power delivery, making this a well-rounded board for the latest AMD processors, especially if you plan on overclocking.

As far as appearance goes, the Aorus Pro is the first board in the company’s lineup that brings some premium aesthetics. It comes with a brushed-aluminum finish on the VRMs and a black PCB. The only integrated lighting on the board is a strip by the audio section. Any RGB lighting will have to be purchased separately and get plugged into the onboard headers. Still, it’s a step up compared to the bargain- basement B550 MicroATX boards we’ve looked at previously.

On the performance front, the Aorus Pro blended in well with the other results from our test pool. Our only anomalies come from the PCMark10 suite, where some of the benchmarks are a bit lower than expected. The board ran our processor up to 5 GHz, so we know boost was working correctly with this configuration. Overclocking was successful and happened without Issue. The N-channel MOSFETs ran extremely hot, but were within their operating parameters and did not throttle. Read on for details on the features and performance of the B550M Aorus Pro.

Specifications - Gigabyte B550M Aorus Pro

All motherboards include an accessory stack and our B550M Aorus Pro is no different. In this case, the low-priced board doesn’t offer much, but enough parts to cover the basics. Below is a complete list of the included accessories.

●      (2) SATA cables

●      User’s Manual

●      Aorus sticker

As noted earlier, the Aorus Pro is a step above the budget DS3H we reviewed in our roundup in terms of looks. The black/grey PCB gives way to black connectors, slots and sockets. The large VRM heatsinks have a brushed-aluminum finish, while a plastic shroud surrounds the left VRM heatsink hides the unmentionables underneath. The board does not include integrated RGB lighting.although, the audio separation strip lights up in orange. If you want to add RGBs, you’ll need to buy the strips and plug them into the headers.

On the top portionof the board, we’ll cover the heatsink/shrouds, socket and the DRAM slot area. The large VRM heatsinks look like they do a good job, but as we see later on, these things get hot, especially when overclocking more power-hungry chips like our Ryzen 9 5950X. Outside of that, we find a single 8-pin EPS plug for CPU power on the top edge. Next to it (also below this heatsink and above the top M.2 socket) are the first two (of five) fan headers. The manual doesn’t specify these headers’ output, so it is best to assume 1A/12W. Regardless of what class the motherboard is, we would like to see at least one with more output.

To the right of the socket are the four DRAM slots. Gigabyte lists capacity up to 128GB with supported speeds up to DDR4 4266. This value is a bit lower than most other boards but is still over AMD’s ‘sweet spot’ of DDR4 3600/3733 with the Infinity Fabric 1:1. Just above these slots are two more fan headers and two (of four) RGB headers. In total, we find two 3-pin ARGB headers and two 4-pin RGB headers. Last here is another 4-pin fan header and the 24-pin ATX power connector on the right edge.

Checking out the VRM, Gigabyte chose N-channel MOSFETs instead of the combined DrMOS MOSFETs where the high and low sides use one IC. To that end, the Aorus Pro uses OnSemiconducter bits. 4C10N on the high side and 4C06 parts on the low side. Controlling the MOSFETs is a Renesas RAA229004 controller (X+Y=8) in a 5+3 configuration. This means doublers (ISL6617A) are used to reach the 10+3 phase count. Overall, the VRMs held their own in testing using this monster CPU. However, they ran very hot, especially when overclocking, where temperatures reached over 100 degrees Celsius. These values are still in spec for the ICs, but nobody wants things running that hot. I’d stick with 65W processors on this board or run anything higher at stock speeds.

Moving down to the bottom third, the audio section on the left is in plain sight, not using any shrouds or faraday cages for the Realtek ALC1200 codec. We also see four gold Nippon audio capacitors. We don’t find any fancy op amps or the like here. However, the audio solution should still be fine for most users.

In the middle of the board, we spot three PCIe slots: two full-length and one single x1 size slot. The primary GPU slot uses Gigabyte’s Ultra Durable PCIe armor for additional shearing protection and retention strength for heavy video cards. The top slot is fed from the CPU and runs at PCIe 4.0 x16 speeds. The second full-length slot is fed from the chipset and runs at PCIe 3.0 x4 speeds. Meanwhile, the x1 slot, also sourced from the chipset, runs at PCIe 3.0 x1 speeds. The only concern I have with this configuration is the x1 slot’s location. If you use anything more than a single-slot video card, it will cover the x1 slot, making it unusable. That said, it’s a MicroATX board, so there isn’t a lot of room and many similarly-sized boards run into the same issue.

Located just above and below the primary GPU slot are the two M.2 sockets. The socket, M2A_CPU, supports both SATA- and PCIe 4.0 x4-based modules up to 110mm in length. The first socket also has a heatsink available to help keep some of these hot drives running cooler. The bottom socket does not have a heatsink and supports both SATA- and PCIe 3.0 x4-based modules. Continuing to the right, we spy a push-pin connected chipset heatsink and the four SATA ports on the right edge. The SATA ports support RAID0, 1 and 10 modes, which is pretty standard.

Across the bottom are a bunch of buttons and headers, including multiple USB ports and RGB headers. Here’s the full list, from left to right:

●      Front panel audio

●      3-pin aRGB and 4-pin RGB headers

●      Thunderbolt AIC header

●      COM port

●      TPM header

●      System Fan 3

●      (2) USB 2.0 headers

●      USB 3.2 Gen1 header

●      Front panel header

Moving around to the rear IO, we find an integrated IO plate, which is a nice value add to an inexpensive board. There are a total of 10 USB ports on the back: four USB 2.0 and four USB 3.2 Gen1, plus two USB 3.2 Gen2 ports (one type-C). This should be plenty for most users. On the video side, we see the DisplayPort and HDMI connectors that only work with an APU. Above the 3.2 Gen2 ports is the Realtek GbE LAN port and to the right of those is the 5-plug audio stack, plus SPDIF.  Last but not least is the Q-Flash Plus button used for flashing the BIOS without a CPU installed, another great value add for those who plan to drop a 5000 series processor in the socket out of the gate.

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Software

Gigabyte includes a few applications designed for various functions, including RGB lighting control, audio, system monitoring, and overclocking. Below, we’ve captured several screenshots of the App Center, @BIOS, SIV, RGB Fusion and Easy Tune.

Firmware

To give you a sense of the Firmware, we’ve gathered screenshots showing most BIOS screens.

The BIOS on Gigabyte’s Z490 boards has worked well for me. The format of headings across the top, with most details on a single page or one level down, makes for easy navigation. We haven’t run into any issues so far with the BIOS.

Test System / Comparison Products

As of late November 2020, we’ve updated our test system to Windows 10 64-bit OS (20H2) with all threat mitigations applied. We also upgraded our video card driver to 457.30 and reran all the game tests moving to the new 5000 series CPU. We use the latest non-beta motherboard BIOS available to the public unless otherwise noted. The hardware used is as follows:

Benchmark Settings

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Our standard benchmarks and power tests are performed using the CPU’s stock frequencies (including stock Thermal Velocity Boost), with all power-saving features enabled. Optimized defaults are set in the BIOS and the memory set using the XMP profiles. For this baseline testing, Windows is set to High Performance before we switch over to Balanced during power testing, so the PC idles appropriately.

Synthetic Benchmarks

Synthetics are a great tool to figure out if a board runs out of spec, as identical settings should produce similar performance results. Advanced memory timings are the one place where motherboard makers can still optimize for either stability or performance, though, and those settings can impact some testing.

In our synthetic benchmarks, the B550M Aorus Pro did well in most tests, falling right around the other systems we’ve reviewed. We again saw some outliers within the PCMark 10 suite, particularly in Application Startup and Photoshop, but this is more due to PCMark 10 than the motherboard and CPU running slower than it should. 7Zip results were also a bit slower than the rest. Outside of that, there is nothing else to report.

Timed Applications

Moving on to timed applications, our tests showed the Aorus Pro quicker than the average results in Corona and in the middle of the pack LAME results. Handbrake times were a bit slower than the others, but nothing alarming.

3D Games and 3DMark

We’ve recently updated our game tests to The Division 2 and Forza Horizon 4. The games are run at 1920x1080 resolution using the Ultra preset. As the resolution goes up, the CPU tends to have less of an impact. The goal with these settings is to determine if there are differences in performance at the most commonly used resolution with settings most people use or at least strive for.

During our gaming tests, we saw appreciable gains when moving from the 3900X to the newer 5950X. Between the clock speeds, IPC and large cache differences, performance increased using this CPU at our 1080p test resolution. If you game at a higher resolution, chances are you won’t see those gains unless you’re using one of the new, ultra-fast Nvidia or AMD GPUs. That out of the way, our B550M Aorus Pro’s results matched that of the other boards we’ve tested so far and is a competent gaming board, as expected.

Power Consumption / VRM Temperatures

For power testing, we used AIDA64’s System Stability Test with Stress CPU, FPU and Cache enabled, using the peak power consumption value. The wattage reading is from the wall via a Kill-A-Watt meter to capture the entire ecosystem. The only variable that changes is the motherboard; all other parts are the same.

At idle, the B550M Aorus Pro used 78 Watts from the wall. This value is on the high side, but nothing extraordinary. Due in part to the less efficient N-channel MOSFETs, power use peaked at 247 Watts, which is the highest we’ve seen so far. If we average the values out, we’re looking at the most wattage used out of the boards we have tested up to this point, by three Watts. That’s ot a huge deal, but if you’re looking for an efficient motherboard, you’ll want to choose something with better power delivery.

The 13-phase VRM handled our testing with little fanfare, though temperatures did get hot. Our hottest sensor reached almost 80 degrees Celsius During stock runs, the highest value we recorded with this CPU at stock speeds. Hwinfo reported the sensor running even hotter, peaking over 80 degrees Celsius.

After overclocking our Ryzen 9 5950X to 4.4 GHz and 1.3V, VRM temps peaked over 101 degrees Celsius. While this seems hot, and most certainly is, the MOSFETs are specified to handle these temperatures (though not much more). We didn’t see any throttling during testing, so everything went well in this short test. That said, I’m not sure I would run this CPU overclocked, especially if you’re beating on all cores and threads heavily. A 65W CPU and overclocking would be a much better match for the Aorus Pro.

Overclocking

There are several ways to overclock on AMD platforms, depending on your goals. If your focus is single-threaded performance, you may want to focus on using Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO) and adjusting its parameters. If you can use all cores and threads, setting a manual CPU multiplier and voltage is likely the better route. While the latter clips peak single-threaded performance a bit, it increases all core/thread performance over the all-core boost. To that end, we settled on 4.4 GHz at ~1.3V for an all core/thread overclock.

Our Gigabyte B550M Aorus Pro handled our overclocked 16-core/32-thread Ryzen 9 5950X without issue. Although the VRMs were hot, throttling was not a concern in our stress test. To reduce Vdroop, we set the BIOS to the Turbo setting, which yielded a similar load voltage to what was entered in the BIOS.

On the memory side, we know AMD is limited to around 3600/3733 MHz when keeping FCLK at a 1:1 ratio to the memory. With this in mind, we add two more sticks and run 4x8GB at DDR4 3600 which is AMD’s current sweet spot for price and performance. We didn’t run into any issues on this board. All we did was to set XMP and we were on our way.

Final Thoughts

Gigabyte’s B550M Aorus Pro turns out to be a solid motherboard to build a MicroATX B550-based system. Priced at $129.99, it offers users four SATA ports, two M.2 sockets, a solid audio section and a whopping 10 USB ports. It handled our power-hungry Ryzen 9 5950X processor at stock speeds and while overclocked, which is impressive for such an inexpensive board. Though if you’re going to overclock any of the 105W chips on the Aorus Pro, you’ll want to add active cooling to the VRMs as they will run hot; theyreached over 100 degrees Celsius in our testing.

I would like to see both M.2 sockets with heatsinks on them, as M.2 are becoming more popular, affordable, and warmer running (especially PCIe 4.0 drives). I also would like to see Wi-Fi more frequently used on this class of motherboard. Of the similarly priced/sized B550 motherboards (MSI MAG B550M Bazooka $125.99, ASRock B550M Steel Legend $150.99, Asus Prime B550M-A Wi-Fi $129.99), only the Asus includes Wi-Fi, though it and the MSI boards have inferior audio sections compared to the Aorus Pro.

Overall, we like what the B550M Aorus Pro has to offer in the midrange MicroATX segment. If you aren’t running more than four SATA hard drives or SSDs and don’t require integrated Wi-Fi (you can add a Wi-Fi card in the spare slot if needed), this board offers users an inexpensive option into a chipset that supports the latest generation AM4 processors. If you’re looking for a MicroATX motherboard covering all of the bases and capable of handling supported flagship AM4 processors, the Gigabyte B550M Aorus Pro is one of the best out there at its size and price point.

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AMD's Ryzen 5000 series CPUs have arrived, easily eclipsing Intel's competing chips and bringing a new level of performance to the desktop PC with the flagship Ryzen 9 5950X and 5900X. With the complete disruption of Intel's high-end chips already well in hand, AMD's $300 Ryzen 5 5600X delivers a similarly stunning blow to Intel's mid-range lineup and slots in as the mainstream chip for gaming – as you can see in our CPU Benchmarks Hierarchy, it even beats Intel's $488 halo Core i9-10900K in 1080p gaming. 

The Ryzen 5 5600X takes the mid-range by storm with six cores and twelve threads powered by the Zen 3 architecture fabbed on the 7nm process. That potent combination equates to a ~19% improvement in instruction per cycle (IPC) throughput, making the 5600X an easy choice for our list of Best CPUs. Other fine-grained improvements, like a vastly optimized boosting algorithm, improved memory overclocking, and reworked cache topology erases the last traces of Intel’s performance advantages while delivering a new level of power efficiency. In fact, as we'll detail below, the Ryzen 5 5600X is the most power-efficient desktop PC chip we've ever tested. 

But with the changing of the guard on the performance front, AMD has also changed its pricing as it assumes the position of being the uncontested premium brand. The company has raised pricing by $50 on all of its new chips, and for enthusiasts, that has a disproportionate impact on the Ryzen 5 5600X: Much to the dismay of AMD fans, the entry-level pricing for a new Zen 3 processor is an uncomfortably-high $300. However, despite the poor reception to AMD's increased pricing, the Ryzen 5 5600X delivers more than enough performance to justify its price tag. 

Much of Ryzen’s early success stemmed from industry-leading core counts and plenty of freebies for enthusiasts, like bundled coolers and unrestricted overclockability paired with broad compatibility. AMD still offers many of the same advantages, like unrestrained overclockability on all SKUs and most motherboards (the A-series is the lone exception), but has discarded bundled coolers for its Ryzen 9 and 7 processors. Luckily for entry-level buyers, the 65W Ryzen 5 5600X is the only Ryzen model that comes with a bundled cooler, and it's adequate for most users. 

AMD also left a noticeable gap in its product stack – you'll have to take a steep $150 step up the pricing ladder to get above the entry-level six-core twelve-thread Ryzen 5 5600X. AMD's premium pricing could be a disadvantage against Intel if a price war forms, but AMD's suggested selling prices rarely manifest at retail, and continuing shortages have found the chips selling far over recommended pricing. That makes it hard to predict how pricing will shake out over the next months.

According to our tests, the Ryzen 5600X delivers, though, beating Intel in nearly all metrics that matter, including performance, power consumption, and thermals, and largely removes Intel’s performance lead after overclocking. In fact, this $300 chip even beats Intel's pricey flagship Core i9-10900K in most single-threaded workloads, and that's after we CPU overclock Intel's silicon. And yes, the 5600X's advantage over the 10900K includes 1080p gaming. You can take a broader look at how the full Zen 3 family stacks up against Comet Lake in our CPU Benchmarks hierarchy. 

Meanwhile, Intel is left without a response until the first quarter of 2021 when its Rocket Lake chips blast off, bringing a new back-ported Cypress Cove architecture that grants a “double-digit” IPC increase paired with Intel's never-ending 14nm process. In the meantime, we can expect further deep price cuts from Intel in response, particularly as Zen 3 availability becomes more plentiful. 

For now, the Ryzen 5 5600X cements AMD's Ryzen 5000 series as the uncontested performance leader in every price band it competes in. Let's take a closer look.   

Ryzen 5 5600X Specifications and Pricing

The Ryzen 5000 series processors come as four models that span from six cores and twelve threads up to 16 cores and 32 threads. AMD increased its Precision Boost clock rates across the board, with a peak of 4.9 GHz for the Ryzen 9 5950X.  

Our Ryzen 9 5950X sample peaked at 5 GHz at stock settings, albeit sporadically, and reached 5.125 GHz after overclocking. We didn't have as much luck with our Ryzen 5 5600X sample as we did with the 5950X, but the 5600X frequently beat it's advertised 4.6 GHz boost clock with a 4.65 GHz boost on a single core.

AMD increased the boost clock speeds, but it also reduced base frequencies compared to the previous-gen processors. AMD says that if you top the chip with an adequate cooler, it will rarely (if ever) drop to the base frequency. We recorded many cases of a 4.55 GHz all-core boost with the Ryzen 5 5600X, which certainly wasn't possible with the previous-gen chips. We'll cover that more in-depth below.

The 6-core 12-thread $299 Ryzen 5 5600X's base clocks come in at 100 MHz less than the previous-gen 3600XT, while boosts are 100 MHz higher at 4.6 GHz. AMD's 6C/12T Ryzen 5 3600XT had a 95W TDP, but AMD dialed that back to 65W with the 5600X, showing that Zen 3's improved IPC affords lots of advantages. Despite the reduced TDP rating, the 5600X delivers explosive performance gains. 

The Ryzen 5 5600X's $300 price tag establishes a new price band for a mainstream processor, so Intel doesn't have chips with nearly-identical pricing; the Core i5-10600K is the nearest Intel comparable. This chip carries a $262 price tag for the full-featured model, while the graphics-less 10600KF weighs in at $237. 

Intel's Core i7-10700K also isn't nearly as fast as the 5600X in gaming and lightly-threaded work, and overclocking doesn't change the story in any meaningful way. It does have two additional cores that might make it a compelling value alternative for content creation-focused tasks, but its $375 price tag makes that an iffy proposition. You're better off stepping up another Ryzen tier.

But AMD does have a glaring hole in its product stack: You'll have to shell out an extra $150 to step up from the $300 6C/12T Ryzen 5 5600X to the $450 8C/16T Ryzen 7 5800X, which is a steep jump. Based upon product naming alone, it appears there is a missing Ryzen 7 5700X in the stack, but it remains to be seen if AMD will actually bring such a product to market. 

As before, AMD only guarantees its boost frequencies on a single core, and all-core boosts will vary based on the cooling solution, power delivery, and motherboard BIOS. The Ryzen 5 5600X is the only Ryzen 5000 chip that comes with a bundled cooler, and we found that the Wraith Spire delivers enough thermal headroom for most workloads, but you'll get a boost from better cooling in heavily-threaded workloads. You also shouldn't expect any meaningful overclocking headroom with the Wraith Spire cooler. More on that below. 

The Ryzen chips continue to expose 20 lanes of PCIe 4.0 to the user and stick with DDR4-3200 memory as the base spec. However, if the silicon lottery shines upon you, we found that the chips offer much better memory overclocking due to improved fabric overclocking capabilities. 

These chips drop into existing AM4 motherboards with 500-series chipsets, like X570, B550, and A520 models. AMD says it will also add support for 400-series motherboards starting in Q1, 2021, but that comes with a few restrictions. Regardless, some motherboard vendors have jumped ahead and are already offering support on 400-series motherboards, so that initiative is well underway. Just remember that you'll lose support for the PCIe 4.0 interface on those older motherboards. 

We've covered AMD's Zen 3 microarchitecture more in-depth in our Ryzen 9 5950X and 5900X review. The highlight reel is that AMD has unified its L3 cache into one 32MB contiguous cluster, which vastly reduces memory latency, thus boosting performance in latency-sensitive workloads, like gaming. 

AMD leverages its existing Ryzen SoC for the 5000 series chips. Zen 3 uses the same 12nm I/O Die (IOD) paired with either one or two 8-core chiplets (CCD) in an MCM (Multi-Chip Module) configuration. For the Ryzen 5 5600X, the chip comes with one CCD with six cores enabled, while CPUs with 12 or 16 cores come with two chiplets. 

The IOD still contains the same memory controllers, PCIe, and other interfaces that connect the SoC to the outside world. Just like with the Matisse chips, the IOD measures ~125mm^2 and has 2.09 billion transistors. 

The chiplets have been redesigned, however, and now measure ~80.7mm^2 and have 4.15 billion transistors. That's slightly larger than Zen 2's CCDs with ~74mm^2 of silicon and 3.9 billion transistors.  For more details of the magic behind the 19% increase in IPC, head here. 

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Here we'll take a closer look at the Ryzen 5 5600X's boost clock mechanisms. Our testing shows that the chips reach their advertised clock speeds within the power limits of the AM4 socket, but they generate quite a bit of heat in the process – especially if you use the bundled Wraith Stealth air cooler. The bundled air cooler doesn't impact performance in light tasks, but if you do a lot of intense threaded work, like rendering or game streaming, the bundled air cooler leads to slightly reduced performance.

As per our normal routine, we put AMD's boost clocks to the test in both single- and multi-threaded workloads (methodology here). The lightly-threaded test regimen is designed to extract the highest boost clock rates possible as we step through ten iterations of the LAME encoder, then single-threaded POV-Ray and Cinebench runs, PCMark 10, and GeekBench. To keep the charts 'clean,' we only plot the maximum and minimum frequency recorded on any one core during the test. 

In the first slide in the album above, we chart out this series of tests at stock settings with the Corsair H115i 280mm air cooler. The chip peaked at 4.65 GHz, which is slightly above the advertised 4.6 GHz threshold. Temps topped out at 70C, which isn't concerning.

Unlike with the Ryzen 3000 series processors, the unused cores (plotted in black) dropped as low as 2.2 GHz during the test (previous-gen chips tended to bottom out at 3.8 GHz). This is a big improvement over the previous-gen chips: AMD added the ability for individual idle cores to drop into sleep states quickly, which reduces overall chip power consumption and heat generation. By reducing this wasted layer of power consumption, the active cores can boost to higher frequencies and they can boost more frequently and for longer durations. 

The second slide shows the same series of tests, but with the bundled Wraith Stealth air cooler. The air cooler still allows the processor to boost freely in these lightly-threaded workloads and we reach the same peaks of 4.65 GHz, but we see a marked increase in peak chip temperature to 81C during the tests, which is surprising given the relatively light nature of the tests. However, that increased heat output doesn't appear to adversely impact boost frequencies or duration, but that changes when we stress the cores more fully in the tests below. 

Ryzen 5 5600X Stress Test Frequency, Power, Thermals 

The second series of tests plots our custom multi-threaded stress test that consists of multiple iterations of HandBrake, POV-Ray, Cinebench, v-ray, y-cruncher, and Blender renders. This is basically throwing the heaviest real-world workloads we have in our arsenal at the chip to see if we can push any active cores below the 5600X's 3.7 GHz base clock. It's important to note that all-core workloads that fully stress all the cores are represented in the areas where the red (maximum) and black (minimum) frequencies converge.

With the H115i AIO, the lowest all-core clock frequency we measured on fully active cores was 4.45 GHz, which is great considering the official 3.7 GHz base clock. Overall, all-core frequencies ranged from 4.65 GHz to 4.45 GHz. Temperatures were fine with the Corsair H115i cooler, peaking at 72C for short durations, albeit with the fans cranking away at high speed. AMD specs a maximum power draw (PPT - Package Power Tracking) of 88W for its 65W TDP processors. The 5600X peaked at 76W, meaning it has room to spare. 

Temperatures were much higher with the Wraith Stealth air cooler, though: We measured sustained periods of 92C, and a peak of 95C, during the most intense portions of the test (Blender, POV-Ray, y-cruncher). This matches AMD's 95C limit for 65W processors (105W processors have a 90C limit), but it does impact performance. 

We can see that topping the 5600X with the Wraith Stealth cooler results in all-core frequencies that drop as low as 4.15 GHz, which is 300 MHz slower than the results with the H115i liquid cooler (but still well over the official 3.7 GHz base clock). 

Naturally, that reduced frequency impacts performance. You'll notice that our test run required an additional 60 seconds with the air cooler - a ~3% reduction in performance. However, this reduction varies, especially if the task consists of a fixed amount of work over an extended period of time, like a rendering workload. 

Overall, the bundled Wraith Spire is more than sufficient for matching AMD's spec'd clock rates in both single- and multi-threaded tasks, but the adaptive nature of Ryzen 5000's Precision Boost algorithms will reward you with higher performance if you invest in a better cooler, particularly in heavily-threaded workloads.

We recorded higher temperatures during our tests than we've seen with previous-gen Ryzen chips, but, long story short, don't get too excited about the higher stock temperatures. This is by design. AMD has tuned its boost algorithms to fully leverage every last bit of the thermal headroom available, resulting in higher chip temperatures – even during comparatively lighter workloads. This doesn't pose any danger to chip longevity and ultimately results in better performance.  

To help align expectations, AMD issued the above guidelines for expected temperatures for various kinds of coolers and the expected voltage ranges for various workloads. Naturally, lesser coolers at more mundane settings will peak at higher temperatures. 

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Ryzen 5 5600X Power Consumption, Thermals

Notably, AMD's decision to stick with the AM4 socket still constrains its maximum power consumption to 142W, which means that it could not increase power consumption for the new flagship models. However, Zen 3's IPC gains allow the Ryzen 5000 chips to stay within the same TDP thermal and electrical ranges as the Ryzen 3000 series CPUs while delivering more performance. 

Those same rules also apply to the 65W Ryzen 5 5600X - it must adhere to the same 88W PPT limit as its 65W counterparts. However, the previous-gen Ryzen 5 models carried a 95W TDP rating, so their maximum power consumption metrics are higher than the 5600X.

As you can see in the y-cruncher threaded benchmark results, the 5600X sips much less power than its predecessors, meanwhile delivering more performance. That's the benefit of higher IPC, and thus more per-core performance.  

The Ryzen 5 5600X does consume a few more watts than the 3600X during the Handbrake tests, but remains well below the 88W limit. The 5600X makes good use of that power, though, and delivers far more performance than its predecessors.

This combination leads to the highest level of power efficiency we've seen in our test suite - the Ryzen 5 5600X sets a new bar for power efficiency. In our renders-per-day-per-watt charts, you can see that the 5600X easily beats most of the field, though the Ryzen 9 5950X comes in at a close second. That's incredibly impressive, and Intel's chips are simply outmatched. 

Intel's chips are rather inefficient in comparison, which is a natural byproduct of using the older and less-dense 14nm node. Intel has also turned the dial up on the voltage/frequency curve to remain competitive, throwing efficiency out the window in exchange for higher performance. 

The net-net is that the Ryzen 5000 processors will draw far less power per unit of work than any of Intel's 14nm chips, which results in a cooler and quieter system.  

Here we take a slightly different look at power consumption by calculating the cumulative amount of energy required to perform x264 and x265 HandBrake workloads and two Blender renders. We plot this 'task energy' value in Kilojoules on the left side of the chart.

These workloads are comprised of a fixed amount of work, so we can plot the task energy against the time required to finish the job (bottom axis), thus generating a handy power chart. Bear in mind that faster compute times and lower task energy requirements are ideal. 

This measure really separates the wheat from the chaff, and the best results fall to the lower left-hand corner of the chart. You'll notice the modern Ryzen chips all populate the desirable bottom portion of the chart, while Intel's power-hungry chips climb to the top of the chart. We can also see the clear progression through the various Ryzen 5 generations by looking at the Ryzen 5 1600X, 2600X, 3600X, and 3600XT as comparison points. Note that the stock 5600X sips less juice while delivering substantially faster performance than the Ryzen 5 3600XT – that's an impressive generational improvement. 

The Ryzen 5 5600X consumes an impressively low amount of power given its level of performance - the Core 5-10600K consumes far more power in exchange for slower performance. By virtue of its extra cores, Intel's Core i7-10700K is faster than the Ryzen 5 5600X, but that comes at a hefty power expense - the 10700K consumes far more cumulative power than the 5600X. 

Overall, the Ryzen 5 5600X sets the new bar for power efficiency, one that Intel won't be able to match with any 14nm processor, including the pending Rocket Lake.

Test Setup and Ryzen 5 5600X Overclocking

We've included our test system breakdown at the end of the article, and we also have the frequency, boost, and thermal testing following the gaming and application testing below. Be sure to check those sections out. 

 Much like their previous-gen predecessors, the Ryzen 5000 series processors rarely achieve all-core overclocks that exceed the single-core boost frequency, so manual all-core overclocking results in less performance in lightly-threaded tasks. As such, we stuck with AMD's Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO), which boosts performance in multi-core workloads while maintaining the high single-core boost clocks. 

We've had great results with memory overclocking with the Ryzen 5000 series. However, while motherboard firmware is solid for stock and general overclocking use, it is still very much a work in progress for fabric overclocking. That impacts the peak memory frequencies you can attain while still using the 1:1:1 fclk/uclk/mclk ratio that provides the best results. 

We've reached DDR4-4000 with a 2000 MHz fabric with other Ryzen 5000 processors, but we're limited to a 1900 MHz fabric speed for the Ryzen 5 5600X. As such, we dialed in DDR4-3800 at 16-16-16-36 timings for our 5600X PBO configuration, and we dialed up the CCD and IOD voltage to 1.15V to stabilize the fabric frequency. We also tried overclocking with the Wraith Spire cooler, but were utterly unsuccessful. Plan on investing in a better cooler if you're interested in overclocking.

We conducted all of our testing on the latest stable version of Windows 10 Pro (2004 build 19041.450) with the newest versions of each benchmark - with the exception of Cinebench R23 and v-ray 5, both of which launched last week. We're already building out those results, which we'll add in an update (soon). 

As a side note, there has been a surprising amount of coverage about the advantages of dual-rank over single-rank memory lately, but this is a known quantity. In fact, AMD itself revealed this in 2017, and we backed that up with our own testing for the Ryzen 3000 series last year. Yes, Ryzen continues to respond well to dual-rank memory and performance improves. Spoiler Alert: Similar gains apply to Intel chips, too. Our memory guru is conducting a round of testing on the new Ryzen 5000 and Intel chips with different ranks, stay tuned. 

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Ryzen 5 5600X Gaming Performance — The TLDR

Here you can see the geometric mean of our gaming tests at 1080p and 1440p, with each resolution split into its own chart. We tested with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 to reduce the impact of graphics-imposed bottlenecks. You'll find the game-by-game breakdowns below. 

We tested the Ryzen 5 5600X with both the bundled Wraith Stealth cooler (marked as HSF in the charts above) and the Corsair H115i 280mm liquid cooler (AIO) to measure the difference in gaming. As you can see, less than 1% separates the two coolers in gaming (those deltas are larger in our application testing), so we only included the tests with the H115i in the game-by-game breakdown below. Overall, the Wraith Spire cooler provides the same level of gaming performance in our test suite as the beefier AIO cooler. 

For those leery of the Ryzen 5 5600X's $300 price tag, look no further than Intel's 10900K to see AMD's justification. On a price-to-performance basis, the $300 Ryzen 5 5600X absolutely wrecks Intel's halo $490 Core i9-10900K in our 1080p gaming suite. The 5600X even takes away the absolute performance crown, too. The 10900K is a bit more impressive in our 1440p suite, but not by much - it trails the 5600X at stock settings, and overclocking the 10900K only yields a scant 1 fps 'advantage.' Which is to say the chips are effectively tied. 

The 5600X is even more impressive compared to chips in its price range. At stock settings, the Ryzen 5 5600X beats the stock Core i5-10600K in both 1080p and 1440p gaming by ~25% and 13%, respectively, both significant gains. Overclocking the Core i5-10600K to 5.0 GHz doesn't help - the Intel chip still trails the stock 5600X by 7% at 1080p and effectively ties the 5600X at 1440p. As you would expect, overclocking the 5600X (PBO) yields an even larger advantage over the overclocked Intel chip. 

The $300 Ryzen 5 5600X is $35 more expensive than the Core i5-10600K, though, so we turn to Intel's higher-end alternative, the $375 Core i7-10700K, to see how it fares against the 5600X. If gaming is your primary goal, paying $75 more for the 10700K than the 5600X is a waste of money. The stock 5600X beats the stock 10700K by 15% at 1080p, and ~8% at 1440p. Overclocking the 10700K doesn't help, either – the stock 5600X ties the overclocked 10700K at 1080p and trails by a mere 3 fps at 1440p. Overclocking the Ryzen 5 5600X gives it the lead over the pricey 10700K silicon. 

Finally, if you step up a tier to the $450 Ryzen 7 5800X, you won't get much extra over the 5600X, at least as far as gaming is concerned. The Ryzen 5 5600X matches the overclocked Ryzen 7 5800X at both stock and overclocked settings in both resolutions, making it the new mainstream gaming champ. 

One thing of note - the bottom four entrants of each chart cover AMD's previous four generations of Ryzen 5 processors. Impressively, the Ryzen 5 5600X notches the largest performance delta over its immediate predecessor than any other Ryzen processor. 

3D Mark, VRMark, Stockfish Chess Engine on Ryzen 5 5600X

We run these synthetic gaming tests as part of our main application test script. We use an RTX 2080 Ti for these tests to facilitate faster testing, but we use an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 for all other gaming benchmarks (we don't include these tests in the preceding cumulative measurements). 

As we've come to expect, AMD's core-heavy processors dominate in threaded synthetic tests, like the Stockfish chess engine and 3DMark's DX11 and DX12 CPU benchmarks. The stock Core i5-10600K can't hang with the stock Ryzen 5 5600X, and even overclocking the 10600K doesn't allow it to keep pace in the DX11 and Stockfish tests. The overclocked 10600K does scrape past the 5600X in the DX12 CPU test, which leverages threading more effectively than the 3DMark DX11 benchmark. 

As one would expect, the Core i7-10700K and Ryzen 7 5800X both lead the Ryzen 5 5600X in the DX12 and Stockfish tests, a byproduct of their higher core counts, but those gains don't translate well (if at all) to the real-world gaming tests below.  

Perhaps the Ryzen 5000 processors are most impressive in VRMark. This benchmark leans heavily on per-core performance (a mixture of IPC and frequency), and as you can see from the previous-gen Ryzen processors, AMD has traditionally trailed in this benchmark. The Ryzen 5 5600X corrects that issue as it reaches the upper echelons of the chart, beating even the overclocked 10700K and 10600K by 20% and 8%, respectively – but that's with the 5600X at stock settings. Overclocking the Ryzen 5 5600X yields a 24% and 14% advantage, respectively, over the tuned Intel processors. 

Borderlands 3 on Ryzen 5 5600X

AMD says that the Ryzen 5000 processors offer leading performance in a large number of titles. However, there will likely still be a period of time before we see targeted game updates to expose the best of Ryzen 5000, just like we saw with previous-gen Zen chips, so the gains don't apply to all titles. 

The Core i5-10600K trails the Ryzen 5 5600X by 4.6 fps at 1080p and 2.8 fps at 1440p. Overclocking the Ryzen 5 5600X delivers small gains at both resolutions, while the 10600K profits more from its 5.0 GHz clock speed, thus taking the lead in both benchmarks.

Far Cry 5 on Ryzen 5 5600X

Far Cry 5 finds the Ryzen 5 5600X beating the Core i5-10600K across the board in both 1080p and 1440p benchmarks – and by significantly impressive margins. The Core i7-10700K also lags the 5600X significantly at stock settings, but effectively ties the 5600X after overclocking. Given the higher up-front pricing and pricey components needed to extract the best of the 10700K's overclocking prowess, the tie actually isn't very impressive. 

Again, a quick glance at the previous-gen Ryzen models, all of which populate the bottom of these charts, highlights the explosive performance gains of the Zen 3 architecture. AMD has come a long way since the 1600X, which was the first Ryzen 5 chip to hit the market. 

Hitman 2 on Ryzen 5 5600X

Hitman 2 doesn't seem to scale well from 1080p to 1440p, at least not at the heightened fidelity settings we use for the benchmark. We stuck with the 1080p test for this title because the same trends carry over to 1440p. 

The Ryzen 5000 processors dominate this benchmark - even the mighty Core i9-10900K, propelled by a prodigious amount of voltage and heat to 5.1 GHz, can't match the overclocked Ryzen 5000 processors. Perhaps more impressively, the stock Ryzen 5 5600X beats all the Intel chips at stock settings, and ties the overclocked 10700K. 

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 on Ryzen 5 5600X

We're just as excited as anyone else about Microsoft's long long-overdue release of Flight Simulator, and we're sure that serious flight sim fans will want to crank up the resolution on this title. Hence our tests at 1440p, which typically bring graphics bottlenecks into play. Expect these deltas to widen with 1080p testing. 

Impressively, the stock $300 Ryzen 5 5600X beats the stock Core i5-10600K and i7-10700K and matches Intel's halo $490 Core i9-10900K. Turning the overclocking knobs on the Ryzen 5 5600X only cements its lead - the chip beats all of the Intel competition after overclocking, too. 

Meanwhile, the Ryzen 7 5800X ekes out a small win over the 5600X at stock settings, but overclocking both chips yields an effective tie. Looking at this through the price-vs-performance prism, the Ryzen 5 5600X is the undisputed champ. 

Project CARS 3 on Ryzen 5 5600X

Project CARS 3 scales well with additional host compute, and the title obviously responds well to the Zen 3 architecture.

The stock Ryzen 5 5600X beats the Intel competition handily at the 1080p resolution. Again, we see the trend of the power-sipping stock Ryzen 5 5600X easily trouncing the overclocked Intel processors. The 5600X even scales well after tuning, propelling it near the top of the chart. 

The trends we see at 1080p largely transfer over to the 1440p resolution, but the GPU bottleneck becomes apparent. Here the overclocked 10900K takes a slight edge, but the delta between it and the stock 5600X is fairly meaningless - you certainly won't notice a little over 1 fps of difference. The looming graphics bottleneck also restricts the 5600X's scaling with overclocking. 

Red Dead Redemption 2 on Ryzen 5 5600X

A glance at the bottom of these charts shows the clear progression of AMD's architectures as it iterated on the Zen design. Still, in most of the titles we tested, the Ryzen 5000 series represents AMD's biggest generational leap by far. 

Again, we see no-compromise 1080p gaming performance with the 5600X - even the heavily-overclocked Intel processors can't overcome the advantages of the Zen 3 architecture paired with the 7nm process. A graphics bottleneck forms in the 1400p testing, but the 5600X still carves out a win over the Intel processors. 

Shadow of the Tomb Raider on Ryzen 5 5600X

AMD's chips take a sizeable lead at 1080p, but Intel's overclocked chips deliver better 99th-percentile measurements. Flipping over to 1440p, Intel's 10900K reaches the top of the chart, but it took quite a bit of voltage for it to surpass the stock Ryzen 5000 chips. 

The Division 2 on Ryzen 5 5600X

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Ryzen 5 5600X Application Performance - The TLDR

This geometric mean of both the most lightly- and heavily-threaded tests in our application suite speak volumes. We're quite accustomed to seeing AMD's chips lead in the multi-threaded rankings while trailing, sometimes by sizeable margins, in the single-threaded performance ranking. That isn't the case anymore, and Zen 3 easily leads both rankings. 

Again, we tested the Ryzen 5 5600X throughout our test suite with both a Corsair H115i water cooler (marked as AIO in the charts above) and the bundled Wraith Stealth cooler (HSF). As we saw in our gaming tests, there is little to no difference between single-threaded performance with the two coolers, but we see a bigger difference in our threaded applications. We recorded a 4% boost to performance with the H115i in our cumulative measure, but it's important to note that this delta varies based on workload. The deltas range from 1% to 8% (worst case in one workload - y-cruncher), but to keep the charts clean, we've charted performance with our H115i cooler throughout the rest of the application testing. 

However, regardless of the cooler, one thing remains true - the Ryzen 5 5600X easily beats the 10600K in threaded applications and even challenges the 10700K that comes with two more cores and a $75 premium, making the 5600X a solid bang-for-your-buck for heavy applications. If you need more performance and want to step up a tier, the Ryzen 7 5800X provides a solid boost through its additional two cores. 

Moving over to the single-threaded performance rankings really highlights the 5600X's strengths - the stock Ryzen 5 5600X beats the full roster of Intel chips, including the Core i9-10900K, in our ranking - and that's even after we overclock the Intel chips to the limits of their 14nm silicon. The stock Ryzen 5 5800X is a nice step up from the 5600X for lightly threaded work, but overclocking both chips yields a small 1.5% advantage for the Ryzen 7 5800X. That isn't a difference you'll feel in any lightly threaded app, making the Ryzen 5 5600X the price-to-performance champ for lightly-threaded work, too. 

Rendering Benchmarks on Ryzen 5 5600X

Cinebench has long been AMD's favorite benchmark for a simple reason; the Zen microarchitecture has always performed extremely well in the threaded benchmark. However, AMD has steadily improved its performance in the single-threaded benchmark and slowly worked its way up the chart. 

The 5600X flexes its single-threaded muscles in the Cinebench benchmark, and while it's not as impressive as the 5800X, we also see significant uplift from overclocking. Meanwhile, the Intel chips can't keep pace and trail by large margins, even after overclocking. Things change with the multi-core Cinebench test, which finds the 5600X outstripping the 10600K, but trailing Intel's 10700K and the Ryzen 7 5800X by appreciable margins. That isn't entirely surprising given those chips' core count advantages. 

Intel's 10600K takes the lead in the single-threaded POV-Ray test, but the remainder of these tests favor the Ryzen 5 5600X, with Blender and v-ray being particular areas of strength.

We recently integrated the Intel Open Image Denoise Benchmark into our suite. This ray-tracing test uses Intel's oneAPI rendering toolkit, so it provides an interesting take on performance. Here we can see that the 5600X beats the stock Core i5-10600K at stock settings in this admittedly Intel-favorable test. Overclocking grants the 10600K a slim lead. 

Encoding Benchmarks on Ryzen 5 5600X

Our encoding tests include benchmarks that respond best to single-threaded performance, like the quintessential examples LAME and FLAC, but the SVT-AV1 and SVT-HEVC tests represent a newer class of threaded encoders. Regardless of the type of encoder, though, AMD's Zen 3 chips impress. The Ryzen 5 5600X is no exception – it easily beats its nearest Intel competitor, the 10600K, across the board. The 5600X's performance in HandBrake, in both AVX-light x264 and AVX-heavy x265 flavors, is incredibly impressive as it trades blows with the more expensive 10700K. 

It's quite shocking to see AMD's reversal of fortunes in benchmarks like LAME and FLAC; a glance at the previous-gen Ryzen processors at the bottom of the chart shows the company's rapid improvements over the last few years. 

Web Browsing on Ryzen 5 5600X

We test all of these benchmarks in a version-locked Chrome browser, with the notable exception of the Edge test. Intel has really taken quite the performance haircut in web browsers over the last two years, largely due to mitigations for its nagging security concerns. 

Regardless, these benchmarks are almost exclusively lightly-threaded, so Intel has long held the top of the charts despite the mitigations. This series of benchmarks makes a powerful statement about Zen 3's improved single-threaded performance, though. From the AI-heavy ARES-6 to WebXPRT3's Javascript tests, and even extending to Jetstream 2, the Ryzen 5 5600X beats every overclocked Intel chip - but at stock settings. 

Edge stands out as the lone exception - this browser leverages threading more effectively, so more cores generally equates to more performance. Intel's heavily-overclocked 10700K nudges past the stock 5600X, but that's not a meaningful victory -  the overclocked Ryzen 5 5600X leads by a comparatively large margin. 

Office and Productivity on Ryzen 5 5600X

AMD's Ryzen 5000: Come for the gaming and rendering performance, but stay for the Office experience? OK, probably not. If you're looking to build a screaming-fast computer, you're probably not doing it to run office applications like Word at breakneck speeds. However, these types of applications are ubiquitous the world over, and snappy performance is important for daily tasks. This is another area that AMD has long offered middling performance, but Zen 3 climbs the ranks impressively. 

For a perfect example of how the Ryzen 5000 chips deliver new levels of snappiness, look no further than the application start-up benchmark. The Ryzen 5 5600X, again at stock settings, delivers a snappier experience than Intel's overclocked chips. Given the performance we see from the prior-gen Ryzen chips in this chart, that's nothing short of phenomenal. 

You'd be hard-pressed to find any weakness with the Ryzen 5 5600X in this roster of tests - there simply isn't one. Sure, it trails Intel's far more expensive chips in a few threaded workloads, but that's hardly a concern given the price point. 

Compilation, Compression, AVX Performance on Ryzen 5 5600X

The LLVM compilation benchmark stresses the cores heavily with branchy code. Here we see that, like with the Ryzen 9 5950X and 3950X, the Ryzen 5 5600X doesn't offer much performance uplift over the previous-gen Ryzen 9 3900XT. These muted gains imply that the bottleneck lies elsewhere, and we imagine that future software optimizations could yield larger performance deltas.

The threaded y-cruncher benchmark also revealed limited scaling for the 5950X over the 3950X. Given the memory-heavy nature of this workload, we theorized this boils down to the same limitation on both chips — a dual-channel memory controller that restricts feeding the 16 hungry cores. The Ryzen 5 5600X doesn't suffer the same fate, though - it provides a more substantial amount of performance uplift over the previous-gen 3900XT, which likely stems from its better balance of per-core memory throughput. 

We also see a strong uplift in NAMD, the gold standard for testing the performance of simulation code. Here the stock 5600X easily beats the overclocked 10600K, but we see a slight performance decline after engaging PBO. That isn't entirely surprising, as this tendency does manifest in some workloads with prior-gen Ryzen chips, too. Particularly if they respond exceedingly well to higher clock rates. 

You'll also notice that the Ryzen chips outstrip the Intel series by massive margins in the hashing and AES encryption benchmarks. This comes as a byproduct of AMD's hardware-accelerated encryption support, a feature that didn't make its way into Intel's Skylake microarchitecture.

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AMD's flagship Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X utterly devastate Intel's mainstream chips, but Intel doesn't really have comparable chips that compete on mainstream platforms. 

However, Intel does have competing models for the Ryzen 5 5600X. Our results show that AMD's Zen 3 microarchitecture simply outclasses Intel's Comet Lake chips at every price point they compete in, sealing AMD's dominance in desktop PCs. 

As we can see in our charts above, AMD's advantage of a denser 7nm process node and more refined architecture pays big dividends. The Ryzen 5 5600X is faster than Intel's less-expensive Core i5-10600K across the board, setting a new bar for single-threaded and multi-threaded performance in the mid-range. 

Looking across the full spate of Intel chips, the Ryzen 5 5600X beats all of the Intel processors in single-threaded performance - but that's with the 5600X at stock settings. Meanwhile, even overclocking Intel's priciest mainstream silicon, the Core i9-10900K, doesn't help against the Ryzen 5 5600X at stock settings. Overclocking AMD's chip only increases its lead.

Given its price point, the Ryzen 5 5600X also delivers outstanding performance in threaded workloads, like content creation and productivity applications. You could step up $75 to the Core i7-10700K, which has two additional cores, for more performance in those types of workloads. But at that point, you'd be better off looking to AMD's Ryzen 7 5800X.  

Zen 3’s gaming performance is nothing short of spectacular. The Ryzen 5 5600X is simply the mainstream chip for gaming - even Intel's mighty Core i9-10900K can't match its performance at 1080p – its only win comes after overclocking at the 1440p resolution. Naturally, the Core i5-10600K and Core i7-10700K can't compete with the Ryzen 5 5600X.

That said, as we've noted with previous AMD CPU reviews, many of those gains won’t be noticeable to users with lesser graphics cards. The tables have turned, and now Intel CPUs are the ones that are "basically just as fast as AMD" with anything short of the RTX 3080. But if you're looking for longevity, the Ryzen 5 5600X has plenty of horsepower to push future generations of graphics cards.

The Ryzen 5 5600X does land at higher pricing than we're accustomed to - the $300 price tag is now the entry point for Zen 3 chips. That will change as AMD introduces its Ryzen 3 and APU models, but it is disappointing for value seekers. Unfortunately, AMD's recommended retail pricing rarely has any relation to reality at the checkout lane, so it’s hard to project where pricing will land in a few months when availability improves. For now, crushing shortages make it difficult to score a Ryzen 5 5600X, even at recommended pricing. 

At least AMD includes a bundled cooler with the Ryzen 5 5600X, an advantage not given to any of its other Zen 3 processors. The Wraith Stealth cooler is adequate and provides the same performance as an AIO in single-threaded workloads and gaming, but you'll get a boost in heavy multi-threaded work if you step up to a better cooler. You'll definitely need a better cooler if overclocking is in your plans - the Wraith Spire doesn't have any additional thermal headroom. 

We can expect Intel to respond with lower pricing as Zen 3 availability improves, particularly over the holiday season. Until then, if you're looking for a lower-priced alternative to the Ryzen 5 5600X, we stick with our previous recommendation of the Ryzen 5 3600 (and even the 3600X if you catch it at a good price). We simply can't recommend any competing Comet Lake processor at current pricing.   

Zen 3 has completely disrupted Intel's desktop PC chips at every price point it competes in, and we're excited to see what the future Ryzen 3 and APUs have in store. Not to mention next-gen Threadripper. Meanwhile, the Ryzen 5 5600X takes the throne as the no-compromise gaming chip for the mid-range.  

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The Ryzen 5000 series CPUs from AMD landed a few weeks ago, and after I’ve had about two dozen liquid nitrogen (LN2) overclocking sessions with chips with various core counts, the records are starting to fall. These chips are just flying! 

I would go as far as to say the marketing hype and multi-day-info-trickle that was the release actually undersold how good these processors are. I'm not just comparing Team Red vs Team Blue here, but Team Red mainstream vs Team Red high end desktop (HEDT) processors. In fact, the Ryzen 9 5950x on liquid nitrogen competes with water-cooled 64-core Threadrippers in the GPUPI benchmark for CPU 1B! This is jaw dropping and helps make it one of the best CPUs you can buy. More on this later. Let’s see how these Ryzen 9 5950x’s perform from an extreme overclocker’s perspective. 

Sytem Specs

I used the Enermax Aquafusion 360 for binning the chips. It kept the Ryzen 9 5950X in the 80C range at 1.35V and a 4.8 GHz clock rate while still managing to maintain low fan speeds. It handled the 5950X’s 16 cores, which hit around 300 watts under load, without a blink of an eye. As you would imagine, the lower core-count Ryzen models are also not a problem. The Aquafusion’s three fans definitely help to maintain better temps over a long period of time, and they don't allow the loop to get saturated with heat. Also, my son loves the RGB. 

I was lucky enough to test half a dozen Ryzen 9 5950X’s, and they all fell within a 100 MHz range of 4.75 to 4.85 GHz for Cinebench R15 on the Enermax water cooler. That’s with a fixed-ratio overclock with no power savings enabled. 

I used the new Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut Extreme thermal interface material (TIM) for all of my testing, and will continue to use it for the time being. The company uses extra machine grinding to make the metallic particles smaller and more uniform. That provides the thinnest possible spread while still maintaining a crazy W/mK value. It’s expensive stuff, but, naturally, the extra processing time leads to higher production costs. 

For Vermeer, aka Zen 3 Ryzen 5000, we now have a grouping of eight cores per CCX, instead of a four-core grouping like the previous-gen Matisse chips. The Ryzen 9 5950X has two CCDs that each contain one eight-core CCX. In contrast, a previous-gen Ryzen 9 3950X has two CDDs with two CCXes apiece, each containing four cores. 

The new unified eight-core CCX alone is an efficiency boost because those threads all need efficient communication with the L3 cache, and each other. So now you don't have to worry as much about an application spilling threads across multiple CCXes as much. Since the chips now have six to eight active cores in a CCX, there isn’t a need to traverse the Infinity Fabric link quite as much. Now core-to-core communication can occur without going out to the IO die if the chip only uses a single CCD (6/8C CPU), which helps in a myriad of ways.

What does this mean for us overclockers? With only two CCXes to manage instead of four, this also streamlines per-CCX independent overclocking. I have found that CCD 0 will always overclock better than CCD 1, by as much as 125 MHz in some cases. I would assume this is by design, which makes perfect sense. 

If you think about PBO and AMD’s other features that boost clock speed, they will use the higher-binned chiplet CCD 0 for high frequency, and if more threads are called, the processor will drop frequency a bit and load the CCD 1 threads while maintaining the power envelope figures. This technique gives you the benefit of very fast single and low core count performance, and the ability to just throw a ton of threads at greedy programs that require over eight. 

The benefit to overclocking is I can set, say, CCD 0 to an overclock of 4850 MHz and dial in a 4800 MHz overclock on CCD 1. This increases my Cinebench R15 score by 100 points instead of being limited to the max of CCD 1, which is 4800 MHz. At 4850 MHz on CCD 0 and 4800 MHz on CCD 1, we reach a score of 5470 marks in Cinebench R15. The Enermax Aquafusion 360 keeps the processor around 80C with 1.34V to the core, which is pretty solid.

I really love doing these articles with Tom’s because the large reach helps me shed some insight on the XOC (extreme overclocking) part of things. I have noticed in the comments that people tend to think that LN2 overclocking ruins the processors I test. Shockingly enough, it rarely causes any issues as far as chip degradation goes. 

If you think about boost clocks for a minute, if your processor in some instances is hitting up to 1.4-ish volts on auto settings, dialing in 1.65V on LN2 is not really that high, is it? Especially at -192C compared to a normal ambient cooling temperature of, say, 24-28C. 

Let’s be clear, if any part I own degrades or gets hurt in any way I am gutted for days about it. This is not a “bench on LN2 then throw away” type of deal. I grind the same CPU over and over and over. I’m chasing records, after all. 

For liquid nitrogen overclocking, the Infinity Fabric is still the “limiting” factor. The cold bug (where the processor no longer functions - 00 post code, meaning dead) is very chip-dependent, but in general, a lower fabric clock equals a better ability to use colder temperature. A chip can often run -192C full-pot (meaning the LN2 pot is full, providing maximum cooling) at a 1400 MHz fabric, but then have a cold bug at -125C with a 1600 MHz fabric. 

So we have to bin the CPU not for core frequency, but for its ability to run as cold as possible with the fabric dialed in as high as possible. Out of the five Ryzen 9 5950x’s I have tried, only one is cold-bug-free with the fabric set at 1600 MHz. I think it’s a safe estimate to say that around 20 to 30% of the chips will do full-pot overclocking. 

Back to the GPUPI benchmark for CPU. I managed to take the 16-core world record at a whopping 6050 MHz with the memory screaming at DDR4-4700 with 14-14-14-14-1t timings. The fabric limit was a little over 1600 MHz. This required 1.65V to the CPU core, but I only needed 1.3V of SoC voltage. The pot temperature idled at -192C, and under load it heated up to around -188C. These chips are not crazy hot, at all.  

What makes this even more impressive is changing the perspective from 16 core scores to include any core count. We can see the Ryzen 9 5950X is better than the best Threadripper 3970X, even with both on liquid nitrogen. The 5950X also beats many Threadripper 3990Xs on custom air and water cooling, and is only beaten by LN2-cooled 64-core Threadripper 3990Xs. The 5950X’s IPC and overclockability, as well as the optimized CCX, all come together to shine bright in terms of performance. 

The sheer performance I saw with the Ryzen 9 5950X still has me shocked that AMD was able to pull this off. In a way, the incremental upgrades we have seen for so long have left us eager for bigger jumps, and it’s almost like we are being spoiled by a new line of CPUs this time. 

It honestly feels like AMD has skipped a generation and given us the meat and potatoes right away instead of another appetizer; I can’t wait till we can have dessert (Threadripper 5000, anyone?).

If you haven't picked one up, or tried to pre-order from the next batch of stock already, the Ryzen 9 5950X is the real deal and I would highly suggest checking it out if you are in the market for an upgrade (see our article on where and how to buy Ryzen 5000 series), or just want to have some overclocking fun. Happy overclocking!

With the Ryzen 5000 series, it's fair to say that AMD has finally, and fully, eclipsed Intel's performance dominance in desktop PCs. AMD’s flagship $799 Ryzen 9 5950X has landed in our labs, boasting 16 cores and 32 threads bristling with the potent new Zen 3 microarchitecture. AMD’s new halo part expands Ryzen 9’s dominating lead in productivity applications and beats Intel’s competing processors in every other metric, including 1080p gaming performance, by surprising margins. Our 5950X sample even breaks the 5 GHz barrier at stock settings (at least sporadically), outstripping its spec and making it an easy choice for our list of Best CPUs, all while radically altering our CPU Benchmarks Hierarchy.  

But the Ryzen 9 5950X is just the tip of the Zen 3 spear. We also have the more amenable $549 Ryzen 9 5900X that comes with 12 cores and 24 threads. Aside from its bruising performance in applications, it’s even faster than the 5950X in gaming, even beating out Intel's overclocked flagships at 1080p, too. 

Much of Ryzen’s early success stemmed from industry-leading core counts and plenty of freebies for enthusiasts, like bundled coolers and unrestricted overclockability paired with broad compatibility. Still, AMD was long relegated to the role of a value alternative. 

AMD’s clockwork execution on new Zen architectures has slowly whittled away Intel’s performance superiority with each new launch, though, leaving Intel an ever-shrinking cross-section of advantages. To counter, Intel added more cores and features of its own, but AMD’s relentless innovation left Intel clinging to the life raft of its single-threaded performance advantage.

AMD narrowed the gap when it transitioned to the denser 7nm process and Zen 2 architecture for the Ryzen 3000 chips, which largely reduced Intel’s gaming advantage to the imperceptible level – particularly in the mid-range of the market. With sales surging, AMD has begun to capitalize by repositioning itself as a premium brand. The first signs of that shift began with the company’s recent Ryzen XT lineup, which found the company largely discarding some of the freebies we’ve become accustomed to and tacking on a higher price tag to its almost imperceptibly-faster chips.

Ryzen 5000 changes the game entirely, though. The chips come with the same refined 7nm process found in the Ryzen XT processors, but AMD paired the node with a ground-up redesign of the Zen core microarchitecture. AMD says the new Zen 3 microarchitecture provides a 19% average increase in instruction per cycle (IPC) throughput, erasing the last vestiges of Intel’s performance advantages while delivering a new level of power efficiency. 

According to our tests, the Ryzen 5000 processors deliver, beating Intel in nearly all metrics that matter, including performance, power consumption, and thermals, and largely remove Intel’s performance lead after overclocking. And yes, that includes in 1080p gaming. AMD is also leveraging its position as the only CPU maker that also makes discrete GPUs by rolling out its new Smart Memory Access feature. This new tech boosts gaming performance by enhancing data transfer performance between the CPU and GPU, but it only works if you have a Radeon RX 6000 graphics card, Ryzen 5000 processor, and a 500-series motherboard. We won’t know the full implications of this new tech until the Radeon RX 6000 “Big Navi” launch later this month, but it looks promising. 

Now that Ryzen 5000 firmly establishes AMD as the performance leader, the company has hiked up prices by $50 across its entire lineup and left a noticeable gap in its product stack – you'll have to take a steep $150 step up the pricing ladder to get above the entry-level six-core twelve-thread Ryzen 5 5600X. AMD's premium pricing could be an Achilles heel, but it's hard to determine the final pricing story given that AMD's suggested selling prices almost never manifest at retail. 

Meanwhile, Intel is left without a response until the first quarter of 2021 when its Rocket Lake chips blast off, bringing a new back-ported Cypress Cove architecture that grants a “double-digit” IPC increase paired with Intel's never-ending 14nm process. 

Until then, this is how the high-performance chip market stacks up. To put AMD’s gaming performance claims to the test, we’ve switched over to an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 for game testing and also put the company’s new silicon through the paces in a wide range of expanded tests, including several SPEC and Adobe benchmark suites.

Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X Specifications and Pricing

The Ryzen 5000 series processors come as four models that span from six cores and twelve threads up to 16 cores and 32 threads. AMD increased its Precision Boost clock rates across the board, with a peak of 4.9 GHz for the Ryzen 9 5950X. However, AMD’s unique boosting algorithms can stretch beyond the advertised speeds if you pair the chips with a quality cooler and a motherboard with robust power circuitry. In fact, our Ryzen 9 5950X sample peaked at 5 GHz at stock settings, albeit sporadically, and reached 5.125 GHz when we engaged the auto-overclocking Precision Boost Overdrive feature, which we'll cover on the following pages. 

AMD increased the boost clock speeds, but it also reduced base frequencies compared to the previous-gen processors. AMD says that if you top the chip with an adequate cooler, it will rarely (if ever) drop to the base frequency, which we confirmed with our testing.

The $799 16-core 32-thread Ryzen 9 5950X comes with a 3.4 GHz base frequency, a 300 MHz reduction compared to the 3950X, and a 4.9 GHz Precision Boost frequency. Intel doesn't really have an answer for the 5950X; the Comet Lake series tops out at ten cores for $488. You can find the 18-core 36-thread Core i9-10980XE for $815 at several retailers, though it comes with all of the normal drawbacks of a high end desktop chip, like the need for a pricey motherboard and quad-channel memory kit. Meanwhile, the Ryzen 9 5950X drops into mainstream motherboards with ease.

The 12-core 24-thread $549 Ryzen 9 5900X comes with a $50 markup over the previous-gen 3900XT. The chips' base frequency declines 200 MHz compared to the 3900XT, but boosts reach 4.8 GHz (a 100 MHz increase). Intel's 10-core 20-thread Core i9-10900K slots in for $60 less than the 5900X ($77 less if you choose to go with the graphics-less F-series model).

If all you care about is gaming, Intel's $453 Core i9-10850K also falls into this bracket. The 10850K offers essentially the same performance as the pricier 10900K in gaming, but is $96 less than the 5900X.

The $449 Ryzen 7 5800X comes with eight cores and 16 threads, just like its previous-gen Ryzen 7 3800XT counterpart, but again comes with a $50 markup. The chip sees a 100 MHz lower base clock than the 3800XT but has the same 4.7 GHz boost. Given the price point, the Core i9-10850K also competes here with similar pricing to the 5800X, while the Core i7-10700K is ~$100 less. 

Finally, the 6-core 12-thread $299 Ryzen 5 5600X's base clocks come in at 100 MHz less than the previous-gen 3600XT, while boosts are 100 MHz higher at 4.6 GHz. AMD's 6C/12T Ryzen 5 3600XT had a 95W TDP, but AMD dialed that back to 65W with the 5600X, showing that Zen 3's improved IPC affords lots of advantages. 

AMD does have a glaring hole in its product stack: You'll have to shell out an extra $150 to step up from the 6C/12T Ryzen 5 5600X to the 8C/16T Ryzen 7 5800X, which is a steep jump. Based upon product naming alone, it appears there is a missing Ryzen 7 5700X in the stack, but it remains to be seen if AMD will actually bring such a product to market. 

As before, AMD only guarantees its boost frequencies on a single core, and all-core boosts will vary based on the cooling solution, power delivery, and motherboard BIOS. You’ll need your own cooler for any Ryzen 5000 chip that exceeds a 65W TDP: The Ryzen 5 5600X is the only Ryzen 5000 chip that comes with a bundled cooler. AMD said it decided to skip bundled coolers in higher-TDP models largely because it believes most enthusiasts looking for high-performance CPUs use custom cooling. AMD recommends a 280mm (or greater) AIO liquid cooler (or equivalent air cooling) for the Ryzen 9 and 7 CPUs if you want to reach the advertised speeds, significantly adding to the overall platform costs.  

The Ryzen chips continue to expose 20 lanes of PCIe 4.0 to the user and stick with DDR4-3200 memory as the base spec. However, if the silicon lottery shines upon you, we found that the chips offer much better memory overclocking due to improved fabric overclocking capabilities, which we'll cover on the following pages. 

These chips drop into existing AM4 motherboards with 500-series chipsets, like X570, B550, and A520 models. You'll need an AGESA 1.0.8.0 (or newer) BIOS to boot a Zen 3 processor. Still, while the early BIOS revisions ensure the processors will work on the most basic level, you'll have to update to an AGESA 1.1.0.0 (or better) BIOS for the best performance. AMD will also add support for 400-series motherboards starting in Q1, 2021, but that comes with a few restrictions.

Let's see how the Ryzen 5000 series stacks up against Intel's finest. 

AMD Zen 3 Ryzen 5000 Series Microarchitecture — The Quick Take

AMD's 19% IPC increase is the big headline feature of the Zen 3 microarchitecture, but it is especially impressive considering that it leveraged its existing Ryzen SoC to accomplish the feat. In fact, the base SoC is identical to the Ryzen 3000 processors: Zen 3 uses the same 12nm I/O Die (IOD) paired with either one or two 8-core chiplets (CCD) in an MCM (Multi-Chip Module) configuration. The IOD still contains the same memory controllers, PCIe, and other interfaces that connect the SoC to the outside world. Just like with the Matisse chips, the IOD measures ~125mm^2 and has 2.09 billion transistors. 

The chiplets have been redesigned, however, and now measure ~80.7mm^2 and have 4.15 billion transistors. That's slightly larger than Zen 2's CCDs with ~74mm^2 of silicon and 3.9 billion transistors.  

Just like the previous-gen Ryzen CPUs, processors with six or eight cores come with one compute chiplet, while CPUs with 12 or 16 cores come with two chiplets. AMD also used all of the existing SoC wire routing and packaging to maintain compatibility with the AM4 socket. As shown in the album above, the Infinity Fabric connections between the IOD and compute chiplets (CCD) remain the same and communicate at 32 Bytes-per-cycle for reads and 16B/cycle for writes. Even though these connections remain at the same speed as the previous-gen chips, the redesigned compute chiplets significantly reduce the amount of traffic that flows over the interface. 

In the Zen 2 architecture (left), each Zen compute chiplet (CCD) contained two four-core clusters (CCXes) with access to an isolated 16MB slice of L3 cache. So, while the entire chiplet contained 32MB of cache, not all cores had direct access to all of the cache in the chiplet.

To access an adjacent slice of L3 cache, a core had to communicate with the other quad-core cluster by traversing the Infinity Fabric to the I/O die. The I/O die then routed the communication to the cache in the second quad-core cluster, even though it was contained within the same chiplet. To complete the transfer, the data had to travel back over the fabric to the I/O die, and then back into the adjacent quad-core cluster.

Each chiplet now contains one large unified 32MB slice of L3 cache, and all eight cores within the chiplet have full access to the shared cache. This improves not only core-to-cache latency but also core-to-core latency within the chiplet. AMD has also updated the CCD's core-to-core and cache interconnect to a ring topology.

While all eight cores can access the L3 cache within a single compute chiplet, in a dual-chiplet Zen 3 chip, there will be times that the cores will have to communicate with the other chiplet and its L3 cache. In those cases, the communications will still have to traverse the Infinity Fabric via signals routed through the I/O die.

Still, because an entire layer of external communication between the two four-core clusters inside each chiplet has been removed (as seen in the center of the chart above), the Infinity Fabric will naturally have far less traffic. This results in less contention on the fabric, thus simplifying scheduling and routing, and it could also increase the amount of available bandwidth for this type of traffic. All of these factors will result in faster transfers (i.e., lower latency) communication between the two eight-core chiplets, and it possibly removes some of the overhead on the I/O die, too.  

These enhancements are important because games rely heavily on the memory subsystem, both on-die cache and main memory (DDR4). A larger pool of cache resources keeps more data closer to the cores, thus requiring fewer high-latency accesses to the main memory. Additionally, lower cache latency can reduce the amount of time a core communicates with the L3 cache. This new design will tremendously benefit latency-sensitive applications, like games — particularly if they have a dominant thread that accesses cache heavily (which is common). 

However, the larger L3 cache does come with an increase in L3 latency to the tune of seven additional cycles. 

Here's AMD's high-level bullet point list of improvements to the Zen 3 microarchitecture: 

• Front-end enhancements:
• Major Design Goal: Faster fetching, especially for branchy and large-footprint code
• L1 branch target buffer (BTB) doubled to 1024 entries for better prediction latency
• Improved branch predictor bandwidth
• Faster recovery from misprediction
• "No Bubble" prediction to make back-to-back predictions faster and better handle branchy code
• Faster sequencing of op-cache fetches
• Finer granularity in switching of op-cache pipes
• Execution Engines:
• Major Design Goal: Reduce latency and enlarge to extract higher instruction-level parallelism (ILP)
• New dedicated branch and st-pickers for integer, now at 10 issues per cycle (+3 vs. Zen 2)
• Larger integer window at +32 vs Zen 2
• Reduced latency for select float and integer operations
• Floating point has increased bandwidth by +2 for a total of 6-wide dispatch and issue
• Floating point FMAC is now one cycle faster
• Load/Store:
• Major Design Goal: Larger structures and better prefetching — enhance execution engine bandwidth
• Overall higher bandwidth to feed larger/faster execution resources
• Higher load and store bandwidth vs. Zen 2 by +1
• More flexibility in load/store operations
• Improved memory dependence detection
• +4 table walkers in the Translation Look-aside Buffer (TLB)

Notably, AMD also added support for memory protection keys, added AVX2 support for VAES/VPCLMULQD instructions, and made a just-in-time update to the Zen 3 microarchitecture to provide in-silicon mitigation for the Spectre vulnerability. 

Naturally, performance and power efficiency will improve as a function of architectural improvements. The reduced traffic on the Infinity Fabric also contributes (it always requires more energy to move data than to process it). Which brings us to IPC. 

AMD Zen 3 Ryzen 5000 IPC Measurements

AMD chalks its 19% IPC improvement, which is the largest the company has seen in the post-Zen era, up to a number of Zen 3's architectural improvements. The company calculated its IPC improvements from 25 different workloads, including gaming, which seems a curious addition due to possible graphics-imposed bottlenecks, and some multi-threaded workloads. AMD's results show that the IPC improvements vary based on workloads, with up to a 39% improvement on the high end of the spectrum and a 9% improvement on the lower end. 

We tested a limited subset of single-threaded workloads to see the clock-for-clock improvements, locking all chips to a static 3.8 GHz all-core clock with the memory dialed into the officially supported transfer rate (AMD used DDR4-3600 for its tests, which is technically an overclocked configuration). 

AMD's generational march forward is clear as we move from the left to the right of each chart. Overall, AMD's gen-on-gen IPC increases are exceptional, and Zen 3's IPC obviously beats Intel's Comet Lake chips with ease.

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AMD Ryzen 9 5950X Boost Frequency Testing

Before we jump right into the game tests (we have the particulars of our test configurations at the end of the article), we want to highlight the vastly improved clock speeds of the Ryzen 5000 processors we've tested — with the caveat that the silicon lottery applies, so your mileage may vary. 

It appears that AMD has under-spec'd its clock rates to avoid another controversy. As per our normal routine, we put AMD's boost clocks to the test in both single- and multi-threaded workloads (methodology here). The lightly-threaded test regimen is designed to extract the highest boost clock rates possible as we step through ten iterations of the LAME encoder, then single-threaded POV-Ray and Cinebench runs, PCMark 10, and GeekBench. To keep the charts 'clean,' we only plot the maximum frequency recorded on any one core during the test. 

We ran this series of tests at stock settings and charted the results in the first slide in the above album. Here we can see that the chip peaked at 5.05 GHz, and unlike with the Ryzen 3000 series processors, the unused cores (plotted in black) dropped to a much lower 2.2 GHz frequency (previous-gen chips tended to bottom out at 3.8 GHz). This is a vast improvement: AMD added the ability for individual idle cores to drop into sleep states quickly, which then reduces power consumption and heat generation. This ultimately allows the active cores to boost to higher frequencies, and for longer durations. 

Things got interesting when we kicked on the auto-overclocking Precision Boost Overdrive feature with the 'advanced motherboard' setting. In the second slide, we can see the chip boosted to a peak of 5.125 GHz a few times, but reached 5.0 GHz on a more consistent basis. That's incredibly impressive given the rated spec of a 4.9 GHz boost clock.  

The third slide plots our custom multi-threaded stress test that consists of multiple iterations of HandBrake, POV-Ray, Cinebench, v-ray, y-cruncher, and blender renders. This is basically throwing the heaviest real-world workloads we have in our arsenal at the chip to see if we can push any active cores below the 5950X's 3.4 GHz base clock. As you can see, the lowest clock frequency we measured on fully active cores weighed in at 3.6 GHz, which is an encouraging sign. Temperatures were also acceptable with the Corsair H115i cooler, peaking at 78C for short durations, albeit with the fans cranking away at high speed. Power consumption peaked right at the 142W PPT limit for brief periods. 

AMD has issued guidance on expected frequencies and temperatures for the Ryzen 5000 processors, which we'll include right after this series of identical tests on the Ryzen 9 5900X. 

AMD Ryzen 9 5900X Boost Frequency Testing

Here we can see that the Ryzen 9 5900X peaks at 4.95 GHz (frequently) at stock settings, but we didn't receive as much uplift when we engaged the PBO feature. In fact, we didn't measure as many peaks during the overclocked test run, but the chip still easily exceeds its rated 4.8 GHz boost clock. 

Naturally, lesser coolers at more mundane settings will peak at higher temperatures. To help align expectations, AMD issued the above guidelines for expected temperatures for various kinds of coolers and the expected voltage ranges for various workloads. We have plenty of our own power testing after the gaming and application benchmarks. 

Ryzen 5000 5950X and 5900X Overclocking and Test Setup

We've included our test system breakdowns below. For this round of testing, we updated to Windows 10 Pro version 2004 (build 19041.450), the most recent build available at the time of testing, and all of the benchmarks you see below were generated within the last ten days. We also updated all of our drivers, firmwares, and testing programs to the newest available versions and transitioned from the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti to the Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3090 Eagle to reduce graphics-imposed bottlenecks. 

We didn't have time to fully explore all-core overclocking with the Ryzen 9 5950X and 5900X, but we weren't able to dial in overclocks that exceeded the all-core boost frequency. As such, we stuck with AMD's Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO), which boosts performance in multi-core workloads while maintaining the high single-core boost clocks. 

We had great results with memory overclocking with the Ryzen 9 5900X — we dialed in a 2000 MHz fabric and DDR4-4000 at a 1:1:1 fclk/uclk/mclk ratio, beating the best results we've reached with the previous-gen Matisse processors due to the general limit of a 1900 MHz fabric with the previous-gen chips. Just dial up the CCD and IOD voltage to 1.15V (not higher than 1.2V), and you should be good to go to increase the fabric clock to 2000 MHz. 

We weren't quite as lucky with the Ryzen 9 5950X, though, and settled for DDR4-3600 for our overclocked configurations below. We only ceded to the DDR4-3600 due to time constraints, though — I'm sure we can get DDR4-4000 stable with a bit more tuning. 

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Ryzen 9 5950X and 5900X Power Consumption, Efficiency, Thermals

Notably, AMD's decision to stick with the AM4 socket still constrains its maximum power consumption to 142W, which means that the company could not increase power consumption for the new flagship models. However, Zen 3's IPC gains allow the Ryzen 5000 chips to stay within the same TDP thermal and electrical ranges as the Ryzen 3000 series CPUs while delivering more performance.

But there's a bit of nuance to the power story, though. As we can see in the AIDA power measurements, both the 5900X and 5950X draw slightly more power under load than their previous-gen counterparts. However, flipping to the 'renders per day per watt' charts shows that the chips are considerably more power-efficient than the Ryzen 3000 processors, meaning they deliver considerably more performance per watt. 

Intel's chips are rather inefficient in comparison, which is a natural byproduct of using the older and less-dense 14nm node. Intel has also turned the dial up on the voltage/frequency curve to remain competitive, which also throws efficiency out the window in exchange for higher performance. 

The net-net is that the Ryzen 5000 processors will draw far less power per unit of work than any of Intel's 14nm chips, thus resulting in a cooler and quieter system.  

Here, we take a slightly different look at power consumption by calculating the cumulative amount of energy required to perform an x264 and x265 HandBrake workload, respectively. We plot this 'task energy' value in Kilojoules on the left side of the chart.

These workloads are comprised of a fixed amount of work, so we can plot the task energy against the time required to finish the job (bottom axis), thus generating a really useful power chart. Bear in mind that faster compute times, and lower task energy requirements, are ideal. 

This measure really separates the wheat from the chaff, and the best results fall to the lower left-hand corner of the chart. The Intel chips populate the less-desirable upper right-hand side. Although the Core i9-10980XE makes a valiant attempt to get down to Ryzen territory, it still can't match the previous-gen Ryzen 3000 processors in terms of efficiency. Meanwhile, the Ryzen 5000 series leverages the Zen 3 architecture to great effect and falls further inside the performance-per-watt sweet spot, marking a new level of efficiency for a modern desktop chip. 

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Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X Gaming Performance — The TLDR 

Here you can see the geometric mean of our gaming tests at 1080p and 1440p, with each resolution split into its own chart (overclocked results are shaded in grey). 

For those accustomed to seeing Intel lead the gaming charts, these cumulative measurements might be a shock to your system: AMD's stock Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X lead Intel's heavily-overclocked Core i9-10900K and Core i7-10700K in our 1080p gaming suite, at least in terms of average frame rates (Intel's overclocked chips hold a slight lead in 99th-percentile measurements). We also see solid uplift with the Ryzen 9 5900X from overclocking (PBO and memory). 

To put things in perspective, take a glance at the delta in 1080p gaming between the previous-gen Ryzen 9 3900XT, which basically runs overclocked right out of the box, compared to the Ryzen 9 5950X. That's a massive generational leap. 

Flipping over to the 1440p chart brightens things up a bit for Intel, but only slightly — the overclocked Core i9-10900K returns to its normal spot at the top of the chart, and it still enjoys better 99th percentile frame rates after overclocking. However, AMD still beats Intel in both average and 99th-percentiles at stock settings, cementing the company's commanding lead.       

3D Mark, VRMark, Stockfish Chess Engine on AMD Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X

We run these synthetic gaming tests as part of our main application test script. We use an RTX 2080 Ti for these tests to facilitate faster testing, but we use the RTX 3090 for all other gaming benchmarks (we don't include these tests in the geometric mean listed above). 

As we've come to expect, AMD's core-heavy processors dominate in threaded synthetic tests, like the Stockfish chess engine and 3DMark's DX11 and DX12 CPU tests, but perhaps Ryzen 5000 is most impressive in VRMark. This benchmark leans heavily on per-core performance (a mixture of IPC and frequency), and as you can see from the previous-gen Ryzen processors, AMD has traditionally trailed in this benchmark. Zen 3 rectifies that issue. 

Borderlands 3 on AMD Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X

AMD says that the Ryzen 5000 processors offer leading performance in a large number of titles, but there will likely still be a period of time before we see targeted game updates to expose the best of Ryzen 5000, just like we saw with previous-gen Zen chips. Here Intel takes a clear lead in the 1440p benchmarks, with the Ryzen 9 5950X and 5900X trailing, albeit not by large margins. AMD's latest chips are much more competitive in the 1080p series of tests.  

Far Cry 5 on AMD Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X

Far Cry 5 finds the overclocked Ryzen 9 5900X trading blows with the tuned Core i9-10900K running at 5.1 GHz at 1080p, which is quite the feat in itself. At stock settings, both Ryzen 5000 chips run neck-and-neck with the 10900K. We see similar trends with the 1440p benchmarks, but the Core i7-10700K reminds us that it has plenty of chops after overclocking, too. 

Hitman 2 on AMD Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X

Hitman 2 doesn't seem to scale well from 1080p to 1440p, at least not at the heightened fidelity settings we use for the benchmark, so we stuck with the 1080p test for this title because the same trends carry over to 1440p. Here we see the Ryzen 5000 processors take big strides, while the Ryzen 7 1800X reminds us just how far AMD has come in three short years. 

Microsoft Flight Simulator on AMD Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X

We're just as excited as anyone else about Microsoft's long long-overdue release of Flight Simulator, and we're sure that serious flight sim fans will want to crank up the resolution on this title. Here we can see that Intel holds a relatively slim lead after overclocking, but the stock Ryzen 5950X beats the 10900K while the 5900X pulls off a tie.  

Project CARS 3 on AMD Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X

Project CARS 3 scales well with additional host compute, and the title obviously responds well to the Zen 3 architecture. Here we see the 5950X take a step back when we engage the auto-overclocking PBO feature, but that isn't entirely uncommon with AMD's auto-overclocking software. In either case, both Ryzen 5000 processors take a healthy lead over the stock 10900K and 10700K. 

Red Dead Redemption 2 on AMD Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X

A glance at the bottom of these charts shows the clear progression of AMD's architectures as it iterated on the Zen design, but in most of the titles we tested, the Ryzen 5000 series represents AMD's biggest generational leap by far. 

Shadow of the Tomb Raider on AMD Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X

AMD's chips take a sizeable lead at 1080p, but Intel's overclocked chips deliver better 99th-percentile measurements. Flipping over to 1440p, Intel's 10900K reaches the top of the chart, but it took quite a bit of voltage for it to surpass the stock Ryzen 5000 chips. 

The Division 2 on AMD Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X

The Division 2 ends up looking mostly GPU limited, even with the RTX 3090 — at least on the fastest processors. Intel remains competitive when overclocked, but at stock the Ryzen 5000 chips lead by a decent margin at 1080p. Not that anyone is likely to notice the difference between 180 and 195 fps in practice.

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Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X Application Benchmarks 

The TLDR

The geometric mean of both the most lightly- and heavily-threaded tests in our application suite speak volumes. We're quite accustomed to seeing AMD's chips lead in the multi-threaded rankings while trailing, sometimes by sizeable margins, in the single-threaded performance ranking. That isn't the case anymore, as Zen 3 easily leads both rankings. 

Some lightly-threaded workloads, like Cinebench and LAME, respond so well to the Zen 3 architecture that it grants AMD a massive lead in the overall rankings. But as you'll see, while the Zen 3 chips excel tremendously at some applications, they also don't suffer from terrible performance in others as we see with Threadripper. 

Rendering Benchmarks on Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X

Cinebench has long been AMD's favorite benchmark for a simple reason; the Zen microarchitecture has always performed extremely well in the threaded benchmark. However, AMD has steadily improved its performance in the single-threaded benchmark as well, slowly working its way up the chart. 

Apparently those days of small jumps are over, as the Ryzen 9 5950X notches a 20% lead over the 3900XT. That's an incredible gen-on-gen improvement in single-threaded performance. The 5950X also takes a 13% lead over the previous-gen 3950X in the multi-threaded test, which is equally impressive given that both chips have the same 142W power limitation. 

Intel's chips take the lead in the single-threaded POV-Ray test, but the remainder of these tests favor the Zen 3 processors by significant margins. 

Encoding Benchmarks on Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X

Our encoding tests include benchmarks that respond best to single-threaded performance, like the quintessential examples LAME and FLAC, but the SVT-AV1 and SVT-HEVC tests represent a newer class of threaded encoders. Regardless of the type of encoder, though, AMD's Zen 3 chips impress. 

Web Browsing on Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X

A glance at the bottom of these charts is like a trip down memory lane — that's the traditional position for AMD's chips in web browser benchmarks. These benchmarks are almost exclusively lightly-threaded, so Intel has long held the top of the charts. This series of benchmarks makes a powerful statement about Zen 3's improved single-threaded performance.  

Office and Productivity on Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X

If you're looking to build a screaming-fast computer, you're probably not doing it to run office applications like Word at breakneck speeds. However, these types of applications are ubiquitous the world over, so snappy performance is important for daily tasks. This is another area that AMD has long offered middling performance, but Zen 3 climbs the ranks in impressive fashion. 

Compilation, Compression, AVX Performance on Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X

The LLVM compilation benchmark stresses the cores heavily, and here we see that the Ryzen 9 5950X doesn't offer much uplift over the previous-gen Ryzen 9 3950X. The same can be said about the Ryzen 9 5900X compared to its previous-gen counterpart, the Ryzen 9 3900X/T. These muted gains imply that the bottleneck lies elsewhere.

The threaded y-cruncher benchmark again shows limited scaling for the 5950X over the 3950X, and given the memory-heavy nature of this workload, we theorize this boils down to the same limitation on both chips — a dual-channel memory controller that restricts feeding the 16 hungry cores. 

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Workstation CPU Benchmarks Test Notes

Some of these applications also make an appearance in our standard test suite, but those test configurations and benchmarks are focused on a typical desktop-class environment. In contrast, the following tests are configured to stress the systems with workstation-class workloads, which is a particular strength for the Ryzen 9 processors given their hefty core counts. 

We loaded down our test platforms with 64GB of DDR4 memory spread across four modules to accommodate the expanded memory capacity required for several of these workstation-focused tasks. We also outfitted the test systems with PCIe 4.0 SSDs to factor in the platform-level advantage of AMD's support for the faster interface.

Puget Systems Adobe Benchmarks on Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X

Puget Systems is a boutique vendor that caters to professional users with custom-designed systems targeted at specific workloads. The company has developed a series of acclaimed benchmarks for Adobe software, which you can find here.

Adobe After Effects CC Render Node Benchmark on Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X

The After Effects render node benchmark leverages the in-built aerender application that splits the render engine across multiple threads to maximize CPU and GPU performance. This test is memory-intensive, so RAM capacity and throughput are important and can be a limiting factor.

The Ryzen 5000 chips take a step forward in this benchmark over the previous-gen counterparts, but Intel's processors are impressive in light of their lesser core counts. Much of this could boil down to having more available memory bandwidth per core. 

Adobe Premier Pro CC Benchmark on Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X

This benchmark measures live playback and export performance with several codecs at 4K and 8K resolutions. It also incorporates 'Heavy GPU' and 'Heavy CPU' effects that stress the system beyond a typical workload. Storage throughput also heavily impacts the score. As such, it isn't surprising to see the Ryzen 5950X and 5900X outstrip the Intel processors in the overall score, but again, the 5950X's gain over the 3950X is relatively slim.

Adobe Photoshop CC Benchmark on Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X

The Photoshop benchmark measures performance in a diverse range of tasks, measuring the amount of time taken to complete general tasks and apply filters. This test leans heavily on GPU acceleration, and the Ryzen 5000 processors offer stellar performance in the GPU subtest. Here they outstrip their previous-gen counterparts by large margins and leave Intel's chips by the wayside, too.  

SPECworkstation 3 Benchmarks on Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X

The SPECworkstation 3 benchmark suite is designed to measure workstation performance in professional applications. The full suite consists of more than 30 applications split among seven categories, but we've winnowed down the list to tests that largely focus specifically on CPU performance. We haven't submitted these benchmarks to the SPEC organization, so be aware these are not official benchmarks. We've upgraded to the new 3.0.4 revision that supports spanning the tests across processor groups and sockets, unlocking the utmost parallelism. 

Product Development and Energy, NAMD on Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X

The earth’s subsurface structure can be determined via seismic processing. One of the four basic steps in this process is the Kirchhoff Migration, which is used to generate an image based on the available data using mathematical operations. The Ryzen 5000 series processors take the lead in this benchmark over the Intel comparables, but the 24-core Threadripper 3960X unsurprisingly takes a commanding lead due to its hefty core counts. 

Flipping over to the Calculix workload tells a different story, though. This test is based on the finite element method for three-dimensional structural computations, and it typically responds well to higher core counts. However, as we've seen often with the Threadripper processors, they can offer overwhelming performance in some workloads, but suffer in others. Here we can see the Ryzen 5000 chips take an easy lead over the rest of the test pool, and it's exciting to think of how the Zen 3 architecture will perform in Threadripper processors. 

NAMD is a parallel molecular dynamics code designed to scale well with additional compute resources and is one of the premier benchmarks used to quantify performance with simulation code. The Ryzen 9 5950X puts up a strong showing in this test, but again, we see relatively muted performance scaling over the previous-gen 3950X. However, we have to keep this in context: both chips have to adhere to the same 142W power limit, so the additional performance is impressive in its own right. 

Other workloads, like the Fast Fourier Transforms, tell a much more impressive story for the Ryzen 5000 processors, though.  

Rodinia LifeSciences on Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X

SPECworkstation 3's Rodinia LifeSciences benchmark steps through four tests that include medical imaging, particle movements in a 3D space, a thermal simulation, and image-enhancing programs. These workloads respond well to increased core counts, and as you might've guessed, that bodes well for Ryzen 5000. We even see the Zen 3 chips pull off a few wins against the Threadripper 3960X here, too. 

Financial and General on Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X

The Python benchmark conducts a series of math operations, including numpy and scipy math libraries, with Python 3.6. This test also includes multithreaded matrix tests that obviously benefit from more cores. These benchmarks have long been a sore spot for AMD's processors, but the Ryzen 5000 chips rectify that issue. 

SPECviewperf 2020 on Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X

The SPECviewperf 2020 benchmarks are hot off the press from the SPEC committee, so we decided to give it a spin with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 to see how well the Ryzen 5000 processors can push along a GPU in professional rendering applications, which has long been a weakness of previous-gen Ryzen processors.

The Intel processors took the lead in many of the workloads, but it is important to note that AMD has shrunk the performance deltas tremendously. 

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To the world of enthusiasts that have long been pining for a huge gen-on-gen upgrade, AMD’s Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X deliver an almost unbelievable amount of performance improvement over not only AMD’s previous-gen Ryzen processors, but also over Intel’s Comet Lake flagships. The fact that the Ryzen 9 chips regularly break the 5GHz barrier, even at stock settings, is simply icing on the cake.

AMD’s clever re-use of the proven Ryzen SoC design and I/O Die, not to mention the now-mature 7nm TSMC process, allowed the company to focus its resources on delivering a massively redesigned core architecture that takes a big step forward on IPC throughput, which in turn yields higher performance and more power efficiency. 

AMD’s decision to unify the L3 cache pays big dividends in applications that profit from low-latency memory access, with gaming being the perfect example. Meanwhile, more nuanced improvements to the branch predictor and front end expose faster performance across the board, yielding big gains in both single- and multi-threaded workloads. 

As we can see in our cumulative gaming and application measurements above, AMD has finally scored a clean sweep in 1080p gaming along with performance in single- and multi-threaded applications. That single-threaded ranking above isn't 'just' Cinebench, either — it's a cumulative measure of several different types of workloads. Perhaps most telling, the stock Ryzen 9 processors beat Intel's highly-overclocked flagships not only in gaming, but also in single-threaded performance. 

We certainly couldn't have imagined this possibility when AMD launched the Ryzen series a mere three years ago. We test the fastest chips on the planet, and these types of massive generational performance increases are amazing, even to us. 

AMD's path from the bottom of the performance charts to the top was a hard-fought win, but while the company now holds the performance crown, it has left Intel a sliver of room to operate as the budget alternative. 

The Ryzen 5000 series processors land at significantly higher recommended price points than the previous-gen models, and you'll have to bring your own cooler. The price for entry on the low end is also higher than we're accustomed to, not to mention that you'll have to drop an extra $150 to move up from the six-core Ryzen 5 5600X to the eight-core Ryzen 7 3800X. At least 500-series motherboards are plentiful, and we now have B550 motherboards for budget platforms. 

Zen 3’s gaming performance is nothing short of spectacular. However, as we've noted with previous AMD CPU reviews, many of those gains won’t be noticeable to users with lesser graphics cards. The tables have turned, and now Intel CPUs are the ones that are "basically just as fast as AMD" with anything short of the RTX 3080. On the other hand, AMD's upcoming Radeon RX 6800 XT could offer additional gaming benefits over Intel, thanks to Smart Memory Access.

Unfortunately, AMD’s suggested retail pricing rarely has any relation to reality at the checkout lane, so it’s hard to project where pricing will land in a few months. This much is certain, though: AMD will have no problem selling its pricey new silicon to enthusiasts looking for every last bit of performance on a modern platform.  

For now, there’s no reason to recommend an Intel Comet Lake processor on the high end unless you need integrated graphics, so we’ll have to wait until Intel slashes pricing to reflect the reality that it is now the budget alternative. Meanwhile, AMD's Ryzen 5 5600X is incredibly potent in the mid-range, beating even Intel's beastly Core i9-10900K in 1080p gaming, which you can read about in our Ryzen 5 5600X review. We have yet to test the Ryzen 7 5800X, so there could be at least some competition in the mid-range — but there is certainly no competition at the top.

Intel does have Rocket Lake waiting in the wings, but those chips won't land until next year and will top out at a mere eight cores. We don't foresee enough of a performance increase from Intel's new architecture etched onto the 14nm process to really tip the scales against AMD's core-heavy models, meaning AMD could reside at the top of the desktop PC game for at least a year, if not longer. 

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Just last week Intel revealed its Cryo Cooling Technology with EKWB, which takes thermo-electric heat transfer tech and turns it into a real-world product. Shortly after Cooler Master followed suit with an AIO-type solution, but thus far, the products have only had support for Intel sockets. This hasn't changed, but many of us were wondering what would happen if you installed this tech onto an AMD chip. So, you can guess who found his call to action: the one and only Der8auer. He tested the cooler on AMD's latest and greatest, the 16-core Ryzen 9 5950X.

Of course, installing the EKWB EK-QuantumX Delta TEC onto the AMD chip wasn't quite straight forward for two reasons: socket compatibility and software control. Der8auer gathered some bits and pieces from other coolers in an attempt to improvise a mounting mechanism that adapts the AM4 AMD socket to accommodate the Intel-socketed cooler, which for the most part resulted in a relatively neat fitment.

Then, because the Intel control software won't run on the AMD system, der8auer set up a second rig using an Intel 10900K-based system to control the software of the Intel Cryo cooling tech.

Software control is required for this device for a couple of reasons, but mainly to ensure condensation doesn't become a problem. When the system is idle, the TEC unit isn't fed as much power, but when the CPU is running at full blast, the software tells the TEC unit to cool as hard as it can in an attempt to keep the chip at sub-ambient temperatures. Fortunately, the unit has an 'unregulated mode' that allows it to override all the safeties.

5950X Cooled by Intel, Overclocking Results

Under single-core loads, with the TEC unit disabled the 5950X saw CCD temperatures of up to 90 °C under single-core Cinebench R15 loads. Enable the TEC, and thermals dropped to about 50 °C.

In-game, the 5950X pulled speeds of up to 5.050 Ghz for single-cores on its automatic boost profile, with the entire chip often boosting to 4.8 - 4.9 GHz on all cores at once (with variances between the CCDs). 

Unregulated, with no load the TEC unit dropped the chip's thermals to as low as 2 °C. Without a load, Der8auer was able to push the chip to a staggering 5323 MHz on all cores, when the system promtly crashed.

For comparison, Der8auer used the Cryo Cooler to push the i9-10900K to 5.8 GHz for validation and about 5.6 GHz for single-threaded Cinebench workloads, which are higher clocks. But, that chip has six fewer cores and lower IPC compared to AMD's chip, so the Ryzen 9 5950X is for all intents and purposes faster than the Intel chip, also when using Intel cooling tech.

The ASRock A320M-HDV R4.0 got a lot of attention recently when the sub-$100 motherboard was spotted running an AMD Ryzen 9 5900X. Now, the motherboard is in the spotlight again, as ASRock has seemingly prepared a new firmware for it to support Ryzen 5000 (Vermeer) and Ryzen 4000 (Renoir) CPUs.

As per the Chiphell forums, the A320M-HDV R4.0 has successfully housed the Ryzen 9 5950X, AMD's 16-core flagship Zen 3 chip, despite A320 motherboards not receiving official Ryzen 5000 support. ASRock has been one of the few motherboard vendors that informally provides support for newer Ryzen processors on long-forgotten AM4 motherboards. Apparently, the A320M-HDV R4.0 happily accepts Ryzen 5000 chips as long as it's on the P4.03 firmware, which is dated November 3. The latest available firmware on ASRock's website for the A320M-HDV R4.0 is P4.00, so we suspect that the P4.03 is an alpha firmware that was inadvertently leaked.

On a sidenote, the P4.03 firmware reportedly adds support for Renoir as well. A Ryzen 7 Pro 4750G APU was sighted on the A320M-HDV R4.0 with a whopping FCLK up to 2,166 MHz. Due to the nature of Renoir's design, the Zen 2 APUs have more forgiving memory controllers and it's not a coincidence that the world record for fastest DDR4 memory (DDR4-6666.6) was set with a Ryzen 7 4700GE, another member of the Renoir army.

It's unclear if the situation with the A320M-HDV R4.0 is an isolated occurrence or if ASRock is secretly working on new firmwares for the brand's other 300-series motherboards. We've reached out to the motherboard vendor for comment.

Editor's note, Nov. 10, 11:42 a.m. ET: Origin has informed Tom's Hardware that the listing of the Ryzen 5000 series processor was an error involving its website configurator, and that it is not offering any laptops with the 5000 series chips. The original story is below.

Wouldn't it be great to have a new shiny Ryzen 5000-series CPU in your laptop? Origin PC has you covered with its newly upgraded NS-15 workstation laptop, which now features support for the new Ryzen 5000-series desktop CPUs from AMD, including the flagship Ryzen 9 5950X.

Yes, you heard me correctly: Origin PC is putting Ryzen desktop CPUs in a laptop, but this idea isn't as crazy as it sounds; origin PC has been building laptops with desktop CPUs inside them for nearly a decade. At one point, it even offered Intel HEDT chips in its notebooks, which is quite impressive all by itself. It's a great business for Origin PC because having desktop-class CPU performance in a laptop chassis (albeit a thick chassis) is very appealing to customers who can use all that power.

The NS-15 looks like a normal-sized 15.6' notebook from the front, Origin made the chassis very thick at around 1.2 inches to fit all the cooling required for the desktop CPUs, and it weighs in at a beefy 5.9lbs. So expect to use this notebook more as a desktop replacement than something that sits on your lap. 

For I/O, you get two USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports, a single USB 2.0 Type-A port, a headphone and mic jack, one JR-45 Ethernet jack, Displayport 1.4 output over a USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C port, one 1.4 Mini DisplayPort output, and one HDMI output. Regarding the NS-15's display, you get a 1080P 15.6" IPS 144hz screen.

Like most Origin PCs, this laptop is designed around the customer, speccing the unit out the way they want. Thus, pricing options will vary significantly based on the CPU, GPU, RAM, and storage configurations you choose.

For CPUs, you can choose seven options: The Ryzen 7 3700X, Ryzen 9 3900, Ryzen 9 3950X, Ryzen 5 5600X, Ryzen 7 5800X, Ryzen 9 5900X, and Ryzen 9 5950X.

For GPUs, you can equip either an RTX 2060 Max-P or RTX 2070 Max-P; the Max-P identifier means the GPU will run at the maximum power limit and frequencies Nvidia will allow on its mobile Turing SKUs. Unfortunately, there is no RTX 2080 option available.

For memory and storage, you can get almost anything you want from 8GB 2400MHz RAM kits all the way up to 64GB of 3200MHz kits. For storage, anything from 256GB-4TB SSDs is an option. The only option that is a bit lacking is mechanical storage, with only two 1TB options available. However, nothing is stopping you from adding your own storage yourself.

Speccing the laptop out with a Ryzen 9 5950X, 32GB of 3200MHz RAM, RTX 2070, and two SSDs, one being a Samsung 970 Evo Plus 256GB and a 1TB Samsung 860 PRO; it all comes out to a surprisingly cheap $3100. While $3000 is expensive for a laptop in general, the fact that you're getting a Ryzen 9 5950X in the mix makes it a reasonable price for that many cores. For perspective, many top-tier gaming notebooks run in the $3000 range. You may also be able to get it for a little bit less with one of our Origin PC promo codes too.

Overall the NS-15 is a great laptop for workstation users or content creators who need high amounts of processing power in a notebook package. You can customize your own Origin PC NS-15 here.

AMD might only have launched its Zen 3 based Ryzen 5000 chips yesterday, but impressive overclocking results are already streaming in. The current world record was set with none other than the range-topping Ryzen 9 5950X (our review here), which Gigabyte's overclocker HiCookie whipped all the way to a staggering 6.362 MHz on all sixteen cores, obviously using liquid nitrogen for cooling.

Most impressively, the overclock was also stable enough to punish the chip with a Cinebench R20 run, in which it jotted down a score of 15517 pts. For comparison, our own Ryzen 9 5950X sample jotted down a score of 10,522 points at stock settings and 11,644 under AMD PBO (Precision Boost Overdrive). 

Of course, this overclock doesn't best the world record for Intel's i9-10900K, which sits at a staggering 7.707 GHz. Nevertheless, with six more cores and significantly higher IPC, AMD's 5950X is bound to outperform the blue team's chip not by a little, but absolutely stomping it into the ground. Stock, Intel's i9-10900K jots down a Cinebench R20 score of 6375 points, and its world record R20 score is set by Splave with a 10900KF, noting down a score of 9108 marks, a cute result in comparison to what the 5950X is capable of.

The overclock of the 5950X was accomplished using a Gigabyte X570 Aorus Master motherboard and a chip voltage of 1.692 volts. A single 16 GB stick of Corsair DDR4 memory also sat in the system together with an AMD Radeon RX 5700 graphics card.

However, it's important to note that at this time, only four OC submissions have been entered in the HwBot databases using the Ryzen 9 5950X. With that in mind, keep your eyes peeled for more world records in the weeks to come.

G.Skill has expanded the brand's Trident Z Neo with a couple of new memory kits that are optimized for AMD's Ryzen 5000 processors, which have officially gone on sale today.

The Trident Z Neo DDR4-3600 C14, which is one of the best in its class, was only previously available in 16GB (2x8GB) kits. It will certainly come as music to enthusiasts' ears that G.Skill has finally decided to offer the memory kit in 32GB (2x16GB) and 64GB (4x16GB) flavors for the more demanding consumers. Despite the increase in density, the primary timings and operating voltage remain untouched at 14-15-15-35 and 1.45V, respectively.

With today's announcement, G.Skill also brings the first DDR4-3800 C14 memory kit to the market and with a capacity of 32GB (2x16GB) at that. Although the memory kit requires a DRAM voltage of 1.5V, it does flex impressive low timings of 14-16-16-36.

G.Skill Trident Z Neo Specifications

For enthusiasts eager to push their Ryzen 5000 processor, the higher-clocked Trident Z Neo DDR4-4000 memory kits are exactly what the doctor ordered. If you don't know by now, some remarkable Ryzen 5000 samples can support a Infinity Fabric clock (FCLK) up to 2,000 MHz, meaning you can leverage DDR4-4000 memory without infringing the 1:1 ratio with the memory clock (MCLK).

The DDR4-4000 variants of the Trident Z Neo come with CAS Latency values that span from 16 to 18, depending on the capacity that you need. Performance wise, the memory kits might not match G.Skill's existing DDR4-4000 C15 offerings. However, they should be easier on the pockets in comparison to their faster counterparts.

The latest Trident Z Neo memory kits won't be available globally until the end of this month, therefore, G.Skill hasn't revealed the pricing for them yet.

If the Ryzen 5 5600X left you impressed, the Ryzen 9 5950X will blow you out of your chair. The 16-core monster has catapulted its way to the top of the mainstream processor chart in both single-and multi-thread performance.

The Ryzen 9 5950X scores are no longer available, but German publication ComputerBase managed to grab screenshots of the Zen 3 flagship's results before they were erased. Given the circumstances, it's uncertain if the Ryzen 9 5950X was overclocked or whether it was paired with memory that surpass the official supported DDR4-3200 specification. While we wait on the full review, we recommend you take the PassMark scores with a pinch of salt.

While AMD has been injecting more cores in mainstream chips for a while now, the chipmaker's offerings aren't quite up to par with Intel's parts when it comes to single-thread performance. If these PassMark numbers are accurate, it would appear that Zen 3 has finally tipped the scales in AMD's favor.

AMD Ryzen 5 5950X Benchmarks

The Ryzen 9 5950X is reportedly up to 34.4% faster than the Ryzen 9 3950X in single-thread performance and up to 16% in multi-thread performance. For reference, the Ryzen 9 5950X comes with a 3.4 GHz base clock and 4.9 GHz boost clock, while the Ryzen 9 3950X has a 3.5GHz base clock and 4.7 GHz. It was to expected that the Ryzen 9 5950X would be superior chip.

In comparison to its Intel rival, the Ryzen 9 5950X seemingly delivers up to 16.3% higher single-thread performance than the Core i9-10900K. Now, you have to remember that the Core i9-10900K features a 3.7 GHz base clock and a whopping 5.3 GHz boost clock. We're not underestimating Zen 3, but it's a bit hard to swallow that the AMD chip with a 400 MHz lower boost clock would outperform the Core i9-10900K. For now, we'll have to trust PassMark's metrics until we get the chip in our lab for thorough testing.

Possessing substantially more cores, the Ryzen 9 5950X's multi-thread performance doesn't raise any eyebrows. The 16-core processor purportedly offers up to 87.8% higher multi-thread performance than the Core i9-10900K. Intel doesn't offer more than 10 cores on its mainstream processors so the Core i9-10980XE, which is a HEDT (high-end desktop) SKU, will have to be the point of comparison for multi-thread performance. Despite being at a two-core disadvantage, the Ryzen 9 5950X's multi-thread performance is apparently faster than the Core i9-10980XE by up to 33.5%.

If Ryzen 5000 (Vermeer) can deliver, Intel could be in big trouble since it's Comet Lake-S army will likely not be able to fend of Zen 3. It looks as though even Intel's upcoming Rocket Lake processors might not be enough.

The Ryzen 9 5950X was just a few megahertz shy of 5 GHz in yesterday's leaked benchmarks. However, the 16-core monster (via @Tum_Apisak) has redeemed itself today by shattering the 5 GHz mark.

AMD advertises its Ryzen 5000 (codename Vermeer) processors with their maximum boost clock speeds. However, the value doesn't take into the chipmaker's own Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO) technology. Under the right conditions, PBO allows the processor to boost beyond AMD's specifications. That feature is probably why the Ryzen 9 5950X, Ryzen 9 5900X and Ryzen 7 5800X are ticking faster than their advertised values in the newly uncovered Geekbench 5 submissions.

Officially, the Ryzen 9 5950X comes with a 4.9 GHz boost clock, however, the 16-core chip peaked as high as 5.04 GHz. It's impressive given that, despite having many chips on our list of best CPUs, AMD has never hit 5 GHz on a Ryzen before, let alone a chip with 16 cores.

The Ryzen 9 5900X and Ryzen 7 5800X seem to benefit from PBO as well. The 12-core and octa-core chips are rated with a 4.8 GHz and 4.7 GHz boost clocks, respectively. Nonetheless, the Ryzen 9 5900X got as high as 4.94 GHz, while the Ryzen 7 5800X maxed out at 4.84 GHz.

It's funny how prior to Zen 3, Ryzen processors would always get slack about not flaunting huge boost clocks. As a matter of fact, AMD itself admitted during one time that the current Zen 2-based Ryzen 3000 (codename Matisse) offerings don't have any manual overclocking headroom. Now we see a more mature Zen 3 opening the door for higher clock speeds as shown by the trio of Ryzen 5000 parts that are dancing around the 5-GHz line.

There are many factors to take into consideration, but better clock speeds usually convey higher performance. Early Geekbench 5 benchmarks already revealed how the Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X stand as testimony to AMD's promise of an instructions per cycle (IPC) improvement of up to 19% on Ryzen 5000 in comparison to Ryzen 3000. Obviously, this means that the Ryzen 5000 will upset the current CPU hierarchy as we know it.

Bear in mind that the Ryzen 5000 results correspond to the best scores out of the limited submissions so far. On the contrary, the scores for the other processors are the average performance based on every submission. Primate Labs Inc. updated the scores around 12 hours ago.

The Ryzen 9 5950X is the current champ in Geekbench 5's single-core charts. The 16-core processor blew past the Core i9-10900K in the single-core test by 17.7% even though Intel's chip flexes a 5.3 GHz maximum boost clock. In regards to multi-core performance, the Ryzen 9 5950X was up to 6.9% faster than Intel's Core i9-10980XE. Intel Xeon and AMD's own Ryzen Threadripper processors were the only ones to beat the Ryzen 9 5950X.

The excitement for Ryzen 5000 processors builds up with every leaked benchmark result. The Zen 3 processors have shown substantial IPC enhancements and now the potential to boost close to or past 5 GHz. There was even an alleged AMD slide suggesting that DDR4-4000 could be the new standard for Ryzen 5000. All things considered, Zen 3 might be one of the most exciting processor launches in the last couple of years.

AMD's new Ryzen 5000 series processors have been pictured on Twitter by HXL. The image reveals the IHS of the new Ryzen 5 5600X, Ryzen 7 5800X, Ryzen 9 5900X, and 5950X. Although the pictures certainly do look real, as with all unofficial information, we have to approach the pics with caution.

The new Ryzen 5000 series CPUs are based on the new Zen 3 microarchitecture by AMD. The company made numerous improvements to the design compared to the older Zen 2 architecture, including enhancements to the core via a more powerful branch predictor, execution engine, and more. The cache subsystem also received some updates, including a new design which allows all cores within a CCD to communicate with the L3 cache, improving core-to-core latency. 

Overall, the improvements give Zen 3 a 19% IPC performance boost over the previous Zen 2 architecture at the same TDP. According to AMD, that allows Zen 3 to outperform Intel's 10th-gen CPUs in single-core and multi-core workloads - including gaming performance. 

AMD will launch four Ryzen 5000 CPUs on November 5: The 5600X, 5800X, 5900X, and 5950X. The Ryzen 5 5600X will be AMD's mid-range offering with six cores, 12 threads, and a boost frequency of 4.6 GHz with a TDP of 65W. The Ryzen 7 5800X has eight cores and 16 threads with a 4.7 GHz boost and a TDP of 105W. Then, finally, you have the high core count 5900X and 5950X. The Ryzen 9 5900X will feature 12 cores and 24 threads, while the halo Ryzen 9 5950X comes armed with 16 cores and 32 threads.  

More benchmark results (via @Tum_Apisak) of AMD's Ryzen 5000 (codename Vermeer) processors have emerged ahead of their November 5 launch. Specifically, the Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X have been sighted flexing their muscles in Geekbench 5 - to the tune of just shy of 5GHz. 

If you didn't know already, the Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X are AMD's new 16-core and 12-core parts from the Zen 3 family. The first will land with a 3.4 GHz base clock and 4.9 GHz boost clock, while the latter sports a base and boost clock of 3.7 GHz and 4.8 GHz, respectively. It would appear that, under the right conditions and cooling, the pair of Ryzen 5000 chips have no problems boosting past AMD's specifications.

In the Geekbench 5 tests, both the Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X's clock speeds oscillated between 4.9 GHz and 5 GHz. The Ryzen 9 5950X peaked at 4.987 GHz, and the Ryzen 9 5900X got to 4.947 GHz. Both Zen 3 chips were just a few megahertz shy of 5 GHz. The conditions of either benchmark run are unknown. It's plausible that the processors were leveraging AMD's Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO) technology, an automated overclocking feature that pushes the processor beyond its specifications to supply higher performance. In any event, it's still impressive to see 16 cores almost operating at 5 GHz.

As always, we recommend exercising caution with preliminary benchmarks. Furthermore, there's only a single submission for both the Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X, so there's no way to actually corroborate the results.

The Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X scored 1,575 points and 1,605 points, respectively, on the single-core tests. It's not fair to compare a single submission against the aggregated result; it's just what's available. According to the Geekbench 5 database, the average single-core scores for the Ryzen 9 3950X and Ryzen 9 3900X are 1,292 and 1,280, respectively. We see improvements up to 21.9% on the Ryzen 9 5950X and up to 25.3% on the Ryzen 9 5900X, which aligns with AMD's promise of a 19% increase in instructions per cycle (IPC) throughput.

The two Zen 3-based processors seemingly deliver higher single-core performance over the Core i9-10900K, Intel's current mainstream flagship part. While the Core i9-10900K is restricted to 10 cores, let us not forget that it's clocked at 3.7 GHz with a maximum boost clock that tops out at 5.3 GHz through Thermal Velocity Boost (TVB). The average single-core score for the Core i9-10900K is 1,412 points, meaning the Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X and are 11.5% and 13.7% faster, respectively.

Ryzen 5000 goes up for sale on November 5, so the countdown continues. So far, leaked benchmarks suggest that AMD has another winner on its hands, and Ryzen 5000 will likely disrupt the processor market as we know once more. 

AMD's Ryzen 5000 launch isn't far off, and hardware detective @Tum_Apisak has dug up some preliminary benchmarks for the Ryzen 9 5950X. Given the timing of the benchmark submissions the chips should be retail samples, but you should still approach the results with caution.

Being the flagship of the Zen 3 family, the Ryzen 9 5950X is nothing short of impressive. The 7nm chip features a 16-core, 32-thread configuration with 64MB of L3 cache, a 3.4 GHz base clock and boost up to 4.9 GHz. At first glance, the Ryzen 9 5950X doesn't look too different when compared to the current Ryzen 9 3950X. When you really look at it, the Ryzen 9 5950X actually has a 100 MHz lower base clock, but makes up for it with a 200 MHz higher boost clock. However, the real refinement lies with the new Zen 3 microarchitecture. AMD hasn't spilled all the beans on Zen 3 yet, but you can expect more details around review time.

The Ryzen 9 5950X put up a respectable Processor Arithmetic score of 611.94 GOPS. The aggregated score for a Ryzen 9 3950X is 562.11 GOPS. The Ryzen 9 5950X is approximately 8.9% faster in this particular benchmark. When it comes to the Processor Multi-Media test, the Ryzen 9 5950X scored 2066.49 Mpix/s. The Ryzen 9 3950X averages 1650.49 Mpix/s in the same benchmark so we're looking at a remarkable 25.2% difference in the Ryzen 9 5950X's favor.

So, how does the Ryzen 9 5950X stack against its Intel rivals? The Core i9-10900K has aggregated Processor Arithmetic and Processor Multi-Media score of 400.99 GOPS and 1142.70 Mpix/s, respectively. The Ryzen 9 5950X is up to 52.6% and 80.8% faster, which isn't a complete shock since AMD's chip does have six more cores.

The Ryzen 9 5950X benchmarks don't just stop with the SiSoftware Sandra software either. The unreleased 16-core chip also did a few rounds in Geekbench 5.

The Geekbench 5 submissions are a bit tricky to decipher. It's plausible that some extreme overclocking is playing with the Ryzen 9 5950X under liquid nitrogen, which would explain the 6 GHz clock speeds. In order to hide the submissions from prying eyes, the overclock could have masked them as a Hackintosh machine. The other possibility is that it's simply an error on Geekbench 5's part to properly detect the clock speeds for the Ryzen 9 5950X.

At any rate, the resourceful tipster found a similar Ryzen 9 3900X submission to shed some light on the situation. The Ryzen 9 3900X operated at 5.89 GHz and the Ryzen 9 5950X, which is an engineering sample, at 6.02 GHz. The clock speeds aren't exactly identical, but they should give us a fair idea of the level of performance uplift, nonetheless.

The Ryzen 9 5950X had a single-core score of 2,022 points, while the Ryzen 9 3900X raked in 1,696 points. That's a whopping 19.2% improvement. According to the results, the Ryzen 9 5950X delivered 12.9% higher multi-core performance than the Ryzen 9 3900X.

Ryzen 5000 will hit the retail shelves on November 5. Don't forget to check back for our review so you're not left wondering if Zen 3 pans out to what it appears to be.

It's been quite some time since AMD released a CPU that can hit a 5 GHz clock speed. But that may change soon. A new report claims that Zen 3 (codename Vermeer) could bring another 5-GHz AMD desktop CPU to the market. 

Igor's Lab today reported the discovery of two new ordering part numbers (OPNs): 100-000000065-04_ 46/36 _Y and 100-000000061-06_ 49/37 _Y. They are reportedly for for models with 16 CPU cores and should be the descendant of the Ryzen 9 3950X. The highest clocked engineering sample seemingly has a 3.7 GHz base clock and 4.9 GHz boost clock. For reference, the Ryzen 9 3950X sports a 3.5 GHz base clock and 4.7 GHz boost clock. If Igor's Lab's report is correct, we're looking at 5.7% and 4.3% improvements on the base and boost clocks, respectively.

We still don't know how AMD will market its forthcoming Zen 3 offerings. The chipmaker currently use the Ryzen 3000-series (Matisse) for its mainstream chips and the Ryzen 4000-series (Renoir) for APUs. Of course, this all lends confusion for the uninitiated. If AMD decides to unify both naming schemes, then the Ryzen 9 3950X's successor should be the Ryzen 9 4950X. But if AMD looks to avoid confusion with its APU lineup, a Ryzen 9 5950X is also possible. 

Regardless of the nomenclature, Zen 3 will leverage TSMC's 7nm FinFET manufacturing process. Although the processors are on a new microarchitecture, they slide into the existing AM4 CPU socket, so don't throw away your motherboard just yet. AMD has publicly confirmed that Zen 3-based processors will work seamlessly on B450, X470, B550 and X570 motherboards; although, certain compromises are made on the older 400-series motherboards. 

Rick Bergman, Executive Vice president of Computing and Graphics at AMD, stated a little over two weeks ago that Zen 3 is marching on schedule for a 2020 release. It seems the chipmaker is preparing something big for the consumer market, and we expect Zen 3 to make an even bigger splash than Zen 2.

Over at Igor's Lab, sources have indicated that the upcoming Ryzen 9 4950X will have a boost frequency of 4.8 GHz, which is seriously impressive given that it's expected to be a 16-core, 32-thread part. As with any leaked information, we do have to take it with a grain of salt, though, and preliminary specs are always subject to change.  

The information comes from an OPN code Igor managed to get his hands on, which reads "100-000000059-52_48/35_Y." Decoding that, the 35 at the end signifies the 3.5 GHz base clock, with 4.8 telling us the boost clock is 4.8 GHz.

Reports indicate that this also pertains an engineering sample of the 16-core part, making it the successor to the 3950X, likely to be called the 4950X -- unless AMD jumps straight to the 5000 nomenclature for the Zen 3 "Vermeer" parts, in which case it will likely be called the 5950X. A move such as this wouldn't be all too surprising given that the current 4000-series chips are APUs based on the Zen 2 architecture.

AMD has also already confirmed that it will release the first Zen 3 based processors this year, which paired with this rumor could spell some serious number-crunching hardware from Team Red. 

Although Intel might be running behind in the process node race, it has always had the upper hand in the GHz race, which is what most games tend to favor in the end. If this rumor is true that AMD's top Zen 3 part will boost to 4.8 GHz, then it might also end up taking the crown for best gaming CPU soon. A new architecture, paired with these high frequencies could lead AMD to win both on per-core performance as well as multi-core performance. 

For comparison, the current Zen 2 based 3950X has a base clock of 3.5 GHz and a boost clock of up to 4.7 GHz, which isn't much lower. It's surprising to see AMD's chips boosting to 4.8 GHz, but it's only 100 MHz more than the current-gen parts, and AMD has shown as that its silicon yields are good enough for high boost frequencies, as proven by the new XT line of processors. 

But, we do have to play the devil's advocate. There is nothing here to prove that this product actually exists, or that this OPN belongs to a 16-core Zen 3 part. With many CPU leaks, we often have an entry in a digital databank to prove that a test was actually run on the hardware, but all we have to go by with this leak is an OPN code from a source we cannot confirm. 

Nevertheless, we're still excited to see what Zen 3 CPUs have in store for us.