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Rendering on Ryzen 5 3500X
The Ryzen 5 3500X provided surprisingly strong performance in gaming due to its lack of threading, but the culled thread count comes at the cost of performance in heavily-threaded rendering applications.
We can spot the clear delineation in the charts between chips without threading and those with the feature. The Ryzen 5 3500X trails the previous-gen 2600X, which comes with six cores and twelve threads, by significant margins across the full spate of threaded tests, like Corona, Cinebench, and v-ray. As expected, the faster Zen 2 chips enjoy an even larger lead in those same tests. The 3500X does manage a full sweep of the 9400F, though the margins are slim in a few threaded applications.
The 3500X notches solid performance in the single-core Cinebench test, beating the 9400F by 9%. The Ryzen 5 3600 offers nearly identical performance in the test, though overclocking turns the tables in the 3500X's favor.
Encoding on Ryzen 5 3500X
The single-threaded LAME and FLAC encoding test results find the Ryzen 5 3500X once again beating the Core i5-9400F, but the overclocked Core i5-9350KF takes the top of the chart by a large margin.
The threaded HandBrake x264 and x265 tests once again find the 3500X trailing its current-gen counterparts that come with threading. The Ryzen 5 2600X beats the 3500X in the x264 test, but the x265 rendition employs a heavier distribution of AVX instructions that propel the 3500X's Zen 2 architecture into the lead.
Web Browser on Ryzen 5 3500X
Browsers tend to be impacted more by the recent security mitigations than other types of applications, so Intel has generally taken a haircut in these benchmarks of fully-patched systems.
Single-threaded performance reigns supreme in these tests. The Ryzen 5 3500X matches or exceeds the 9400F in the Speedometer 2 benchmark, but trails in WebXPRT 3 and ARES-6. Overclocking helps, but the overclocked Core i3-9350KF is a potent force in these tests.
Office and Productivity on Ryzen 5 3500X
The stock 3500X posts solid performance in the Microsoft Office overall score, again beating the Core i5-9400F, but the Ryzen 3000 chips equipped with threading are faster. Overclocking improves performance, but similar efforts with other Ryzen 3000 chips yield higher scores.
Compression, Encryption, AVX on Ryzen 5 3500X
The 7zip and Zlib compression/decompression benchmarks rely heavily upon threading and work directly from system memory, thus avoiding the traditional storage bottleneck in these types of tasks. The 3500X trails other 3000-series chips in these benchmarks with a 56% and 30% deficit in the 7zip decompression and compression tests, respectively, and a 50% deficit in the Zlib test.
The heavily-threaded y-cruncher benchmark, which computes pi using the taxing AVX instruction set, finds the overclocked 3500X trailing only the 9350KF in the single-threaded test, while its 3000-series counterpart take the lead in the multi-threaded test.
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