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AMD Ryzen 5 5600 and 5500 Gaming Benchmarks — The TLDR
As 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. You would never see these low-end chips paired with an RTX 3090, but this allows us to highlight unrestrained chip performance. Because most of the titles below show little meaningful differentiation at higher resolutions, we only tested four of the seven titles at 1440p. We typically include Microsoft Flight Simulator in our test suite, but we encountered inexplicable issues with loading the game on our AMD test platforms and didn't have time to rectify the issue prior to the NDA lift (this issue is with the game itself, and is not indicative of an issue with AMD's chips).
At stock settings, the Core i5-12400 is 2% faster than the Ryzen 5 5600 in our overall measurement of 1080p gaming performance, which is a slim victory. After overclocking, the 12400 is 3.9% faster than the Ryzen 5 5600 and ties the 5600X for the overall lead.
The Ryzen 5 5600 is basically a 5600X-killer — it doesn't make sense to spend the extra cash for such slim gains. Both the 12400 and the 5600 retail for $199, and that's a tough position for the Ryzen 5 5600 given its aging AM4 platform with less sophisticated connectivity. Additionally, you could choose the graphics-less 12400F that offers the same performance as the full-featured model for ~$175, helping reduce the extra costs associated with Alder Lake motherboards.
The Ryzen 5 5500 falls within 2 percent of the Ryzen 5 5600G in the 1080p benchmarks, but it isn't as much of a closely-contested battle against the Intel chips. The less-expensive $129 Core i3-12100 is 6.2% faster in gaming at stock settings than the $159 Ryzen 5 5500, and basically ties the overclocked 5500 without any effort.
If gaming is all you're interested in, the Core i3-12100 is the better buy with a much more modern platform — the 5500 is limited to the PCIe 3.0 interface. However, the Ryzen 5 5500 will have advantages for the productivity-minded, as we'll see in the application benchmarks.
Both the new Ryzen chips offer a tremendous step forward over their Zen 2 predecessors. The Ryzen 5 5500 is roughly 10% faster than the Ryzen 5 3600X and 3600, while the Ryzen 5 5600 is ~30% faster, representing a massive generational improvement.
| Tom's Hardware | 1080p Game Benchmarks - fps %age |
| Core i5-12400 | 100% |
| Ryzen 5 5600X | 98.71% |
| Ryzen 5 5600 | 98.1% |
| Core i3-12100 | 88.4% |
| Ryzen 5 5600G | 84.5% |
| Ryzen 5 5500 | 83.2% |
Naturally, moving over to 1440p brings a GPU bottleneck into the equation, so the performance deltas between the chips shrink tremendously. Flipping through the 99th percentile charts for both resolutions also shows larger deltas, but we have to view those with caution as Windows 11 seems to suffer from more framerate variability than our Windows 10 test platform.
Be aware that large performance deltas in a few of the game titles can heavily impact these types of overall measurements. It's always best to make an informed decision based on the types of titles you play frequently, so be sure to check out the individual game benchmarks below.
3DMark, VRMark, Chess Engines on AMD Ryzen 5 5600 and 5500
Synthetic benchmarks don't tend to translate well to real-world gaming, but they do show us the raw amount of compute power exposed to game engines. It's too bad most games don't fully exploit it.
Far Cry 6 on AMD Ryzen 5 5600 and 5500
F1 2021 on AMD Ryzen 5 5600 and 5500
Hitman 3 on AMD Ryzen 5 5600 and 5500
Horizon Zero Dawn on AMD Ryzen 5 5600 and 5500
Red Dead Redemption 2 on AMD Ryzen 5 5600 and 5500
Watch Dogs Legion on AMD Ryzen 5 5600 and 5500
- MORE: Best CPUs for Gaming
- MORE: CPU Benchmark Hierarchy
- MORE: AMD vs Intel
- MORE: How to Overclock a CPU
