Rendering
AMD's Ryzen 5 2600 at stock settings outperformed the Ryzen 5 1600, but generally lagged the rest of the field in rendering workloads emphasizing single-core performance.
Switching to heavily-threaded benchmarks helped Ryzen 5 2600 redeem itself, particularly after we overclocked it. Again, the Ryzen 5 2600X operates at higher clock rates out of the box, so it didn't pick up as much performance after tuning.
Encoding & Compression
LAME is a quintessential single-threaded workload that typically illustrates Intel's per-clock advantage. The overclocked Ryzen 5 2600 was plenty competitive in this workload though, beating Intel's stock Core i7-8700K.
Our threaded compression and decompression tests work directly from system memory, removing storage throughput from the equation. Ryzen 5 2600 landed where we expected it to; the CPU's advances over Ryzen 5 1600 are largely related to improved memory performance.
The x264 HandBrake tests went Intel's way, particularly after we overclocked the Core CPUs. However, the company's multiplier-locked Core i5-8400 couldn't muster enough performance to beat a stock Ryzen 5 2600. Intel's propensity for over-segmenting its portfolio once again proves costly against AMD's more enthusiast-friendly alternatives. Incidentally, Core i5-8400 was much more competitive in the x265 test, which makes greater use of AVX instructions that play well to Intel's architecture.
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