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Workstation Benchmarks
2D Benchmarks: DirectX And GDI/GDI+
Ryzen 5 1500X falls into the bottom range of AMD's portfolio during these lightly threaded tests, although the quad-core chip does notably outpace Ryzen 7 1700 in a few tests due to its frequency advantage.
2D Benchmarks: Adobe Creative Cloud
The Intel processors continue reaping the fruits of higher IPC throughput in several of these benchmarks, but most productivity-oriented applications don't expose massive performance deficits that would significantly hamper the user experience.
Ryzen 5 1500X surprisingly trails the FX-8370 through our InDesign workload. Then again, there is a mere 1.41-second gap between the best and worst results. After Effects reveals larger disparities. The 1500X trails AMD's 1600X by 14.59 seconds, but beats the Core i5-7500 (its closest competitor based on cost).
3D Benchmarks: DirectX and OpenGL
The 1500X doesn't benefit from its SMT-enabled cores in these lightly-threaded workloads.
We use stock settings to better reflect a real-world workstation environment. Although tuning would help AMD's CPUs, overclocking is less typical in the professional space.
Notably, the 1500X outstrips Ryzen 7 1700 in all of these tests.
CPU Performance: Workstation
The 1500X doesn't perform as well as expected in SolidWorks, but it is more competitive in threaded workloads and trades blows with the Core i5s.
CPU Performance: Photorealistic Rendering
Rendering workloads reward the 1500X's SMT-enabled cores, helping Ryzen trump the Core i5-7500 and, in some cases, Core i5-7600K.
The 1500X isn't as potent as Ryzen 5 1600X with its six cores. However, the quad-core configuration offers a lot of value in applications like Blender, 3ds Max, and LuxRender.
CPU Performance: Encoding & Compression/Decompression
The HandBrake workloads utilize however many threads you offer them, so Ryzen 5 1500X unsurprisingly goes up against the Core i5-7500 and -7600K.
Decompression in 7-Zip isn't as taxing, so the 1500X falls to the bottom of our chart. But packing files into an archive can be parallelized more effectively, giving Ryzen an advantage over Intel's Core i5-7500.
In heavily-threaded workloads, Ryzen 5 1500X trails the pricier six-core Ryzen 5 1600X by a large margin. That's alright though, we think. In this price bracket, a quad-core host processor doesn't need to excel in workstation-oriented tasks. It's far more likely to end up in gaming systems. Still we like knowing that Ryzen can handle heavy lifting in a quad-core configuration if needed.
MORE: Best CPUs
MORE: Intel & AMD Processor Hierarchy
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