AMD Ryzen 5 5500F review: Vermeer rides again for budget gaming PCs

The Ryzen 5 5500F is primarily a gaming CPU, clocked fairly low at a 4.4 GHz boost and packing just six Zen 3 cores. The six-core floor that AMD has maintained for several generations gives the 5500F a significant edge over the Core i3-14100F, which uses a true quad-core design, bypassing the hybrid design that Intel has used on its past several generations of desktop CPUs.

There aren’t a lot of quad-core chips on the market today, so it’s no surprise to see the Core i3-14100F at the bottom of the chart here, regardless of whether it’s paired with DDR4 or DDR5. The Ryzen 5500 already led Intel by 12.8% in our multi-threaded geomean, but the 5500F nearly doubles that lead to 24.2%. Compared to the 5500, the new 5500F is a clean 10% ahead in our multithreaded geomean.

The scales unsurprisingly flip looking at single-threaded performance. Intel usually leads in single-threaded performance anyway, but some context is important here. Zen 3 is much older than Raptor Lake, and those microarchitectural differences really show up in our single-threaded testing.

On microarchitecture, the Ryzen 5 5500F is 5% ahead of the 5500 in our single-threaded geomean, aligning almost perfectly with the 5% boost in turbo clock speed that the 5500F has. That’s a welcome bump, though keep in mind that a 4.4 GHz boost is still relatively low, and the 5500F only has access to 16 MB of L3. Other Vermeer CPUs, such as the 5700X, have 32 MB.

Rendering Benchmarks

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CPU rendering workloads are intense, sustained tasks often pinning either an individual core, or all of the cores, at full utilization. Because they’re sustained and demanding, many of our rendering tests factor into the geomean above, and that’s a major driving force behind why tests like Cinebench are such a staple when measuring CPU performance.

For the headline tests like POV-Ray and Cinebench, the results fall as you’d expect. AMD leads in multi-threaded work, Intel in single-threaded work, and the 5500F ends up between 5% and 10% faster than the 5500, depending on the benchmark.

Encoding Benchmarks

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Encoding workloads are similarly all-out for the CPU cores, and in heavy, multi-threaded video encoding via HandBrake, the 5500F is only marginally faster than the 5500. Particularly in these heavy video encodes, the fact that the 5500F has access to six cores matters more than anything else. That slight boost in clock speed helps it squeeze out an advantage; however, with any of these workloads, you’ll notice the 5500F struggles to get along, just like the Core i3-14100 and base 5500.

Single-threaded encoding via LAME shows an advantage for Intel, unsurprisingly, but the multi-threaded workloads are what matter here. As a demonstration, look at our VP9 HandBrake results. The 5500 actually ended up faster than the 5500F here, though by just 1 FPS, when the standard for these chips is managing just 4 FPS for this encode.

Creator App Benchmarks

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The main CPUs we’re focused on — 5500, 5500F, and 14100F — aren’t the best choice when it comes to modern creative applications, particularly when it comes to the more demanding workloads in nonlinear video editors like Resolve and Premiere, as well as visual effects in After Effects. In Photoshop, the three ~$100 CPUs all hit a performance wall, though likely for different reasons, as you can see the DDR5-equipped 14100F run into the same bottleneck as the DDR4 version.

Web and Office Benchmarks

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Web and office workloads are par for the course when it comes to the Ryzen 5 5500F. Although Intel retains a lead in our web and office benchmarks, the 5500F does a lot to close the gap compared to the 5500, at least in some tests. Looking at general web workloads through WebXPRT and Procyon, there isn’t much of a difference between the main chips we’re focused on.

However, the 5500F gains some ground in Excel with a 9.7% jump over the 5500. It was a massive 35% faster in Word, finally closing in on the 14100F, and it was 6.7% faster in PowerPoint. Even by the standards of budget CPUs, the Ryzen 5 5500 didn’t perform well in these applications. The 5500F puts AMD’s budget offering back in contention.

Chess Engines, Compilation, Compression, AVX, and Other Benchmarks

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We run hundreds of tests on every CPU that comes across our benches, and not all of them are relevant to every chip. Here, we have a collection of more specialised workloads that don’t factor into our overall geomean. The tests are greatly varied here, including code compilation, compression performance, Java, chess engines, and cryptography, among other tests. We won’t be able to highlight all of them.

The most recognizable is Geekbench, showing a broader view of single-threaded and multi-threaded performance in a machine-gun-style benchmark suite that rips through different workloads in just a few minutes. What’s interesting is that Geekbench multi-thread shows the 14100F paired with DDR5 on top, likely taking into account the memory standard that isn’t represented in tests like Cinebench.

Another interesting test to highlight is memory throughput via WinSAT. This built-in Windows benchmark shows a clear performance wall for the DDR4 chips in our test suite. Of course, DDR5 provides much more throughput, but the interesting bit here is just how bottlenecked the throughput is with these late-stage DDR4 CPUs.

Elsewhere, there are a few broad trends that emerge. In security and cryptography workloads, AMD rules the roost. However, in many scientific workloads, Intel holds an edge. Again, these workloads aren’t particularly relevant for these CPUs, so we’d recommend placing more emphasis on the benchmarks in the sections above.

SPEC Workstation benchmarks

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We run SPEC Workstation as part of every CPU pass, and although workstation application performance isn’t relevant to these budget desktop chips, it’s still interesting to see how these applications push against the limitations of such restricted CPU designs. Feel free to peruse, but don’t put too much stock in the actual rankings. These are unrealistic workloads for this class of CPU.

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