Adobe Creative Cloud
Ryzen 5 2600 delivered an incredible performance boost compared to its predecessor in our Adobe Creative Cloud suite. With that said, Intel's CPUs still lead through most of these lightly-threaded applications. We also saw larger performance differences between the stock and overclocked Ryzen 5 2600 compared to the 2600X, mostly due to the 2600's lower stock frequencies and similar overclocking limit shared between most Ryzen 2000-series models.
In the end, a stock Ryzen 5 2600 beat Intel's Core i5-8400 and AMD's Ryzen 7 2700 in the overall score. That's impressive for such a value-oriented chip.
Web Browser
The Meltdown and Spectre patches imposed performance penalties on Intel's CPUs in our web browser tests. However, they still lead through these lightly-threaded tests.
AMD's Ryzen 5 2600 easily beat the stock Ryzen 5 1600, which took a last-place finish among the models we benchmarked. As expected, overclocking helped put Ryzen 5 2600 on par with the more expensive Ryzen 5 2600X.
Productivity
The application start-up metric measures load time snappiness in word processors, GIMP, and Web browsers under warm- and cold-start conditions. Other platform-level considerations affect this test as well, including the storage subsystem. Intel's snappy performance in these lightly-threaded apps put its Core CPUs ahead of the competing Ryzen chips.
Our video conferencing suite measures performance in single- and multi-user applications that utilize the Windows Media Foundation for playback and encoding. It also performs facial detection to model real-world usage. Cores and threads benefit this workload greatly, so Ryzen 5 2600's six cores naturally fared well.
The photo editing benchmark measures performance with Futuremark's binaries using the ImageMagick library. Common photo processing workloads also tend to be parallelized, so Ryzen 5 easily beat the Core i5 models.
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