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.
Rendering, Encoding and Compression
Rendering
AMD's Ryzen 7 2700 shows the value of eight cores armed with simultaneous multi-threading technology through our parallelized rendering workloads.
The Core i5-9600K trails its comparably-priced competition from AMD, and it only offers a small step forward versus the previous-gen Core i5-8600K.
Single-threaded workloads, regardless of software type, are still dominated by Intel's capable architectures.
Encoding & Compression
Our threaded compression and decompression metrics work directly from system memory, removing storage throughput from the equation. The Ryzen 7 2700 and Ryzen 5 2600X are competitive in the compression test, but really stretch their legs during our decompression workload.
y-cruncher, a single- and multi-threaded program that computes pi, is a great benchmark for measuring the effect of AVX instructions. Intel processors have no trouble establishing a lead in this kind of test.
The Core i5-9600K beats AMD's Ryzen 7 2700 and Ryzen 5 2600X in our HandBrake x265 metric, which is heavily optimized for AVX instructions. That changes during the H.264 benchmark, which sees the Core i5-9600K trail a stock Ryzen 5 2600X. Intel needs a 5 GHz overclock to overtake the stock Ryzen 7 2700.
MORE: Best CPUs
MORE: Intel & AMD Processor Hierarchy
MORE: All CPUs Content
Raspberry Pi Monitor Review: Well-built portable monitor that works with any HDMI-capable device
Raspberry Pi 500 Review: The keyboard is the computer, again
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
