Why you can trust Tom's Hardware Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.
AotS: Escalation & Battlefield 1
Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation
Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation's recent patch helped level the playing field between AMD and Intel processors. The CPU test scales well with core/thread count, so it might be natural to assume that Ryzen 5 1500X would enjoy an advantage due to its SMT implementation. But at stock settings, it doesn't. Rather, the 1500X slightly trails Intel's competing CPUs.
Overclocking does help AMD overcome the locked Core i5s.
Also, we noticed visible hitching on the Ryzen 5 1500X and Core i5-7400 platforms during the CPU-intensive test, and that tendency is reflected well in our frame time over run chart.
Battlefield 1
We dialed Battlefield 1 up to the Ultra preset and repetitively took an armor-laden stroll across the O La Vittoria landscape.
AMD's stock Ryzen 5 1500X falls to the bottom of the pack. Overclocking offers a small performance increase, but it's not enough to propel AMD's quad-core model ahead of Intel's Core i5s. Notably, the overclocked 1500X does offer a higher minimum frame rate than the Core i5-7400.
The i5-7400 also stumbles under several frame time outliers, which are visible during gameplay. The overclocked 1500X, in contrast, provides a similarly smooth experience as the Core i5-7500.
MORE: Best CPUs
MORE: Intel & AMD Processor Hierarchy
MORE: All CPU Content
Microsoft preparing Lunar Lake Surface and Surface Pro laptops for 1Q25, says report – new Surface Laptop Studio and an 11-inch Surface also on the horizon
Camouflage eSports monitors launched by JAPANNEXT – but you probably won't see them in stores
Zero-day Windows NTLM hash vulnerability gets patched by third-party — credentials can be hijacked by merely viewing a malicious file in File Explorer
