Office & Productivity
Adobe Creative Cloud
Most of the Adobe Suite responds well to high clock rates and IPC throughput, favoring Intel's CPUs. InDesign scales well with core count, but Intel's Coffee Lake models cling on to a lead nonetheless.
Web Browser
The web browsing tests are largely organized into per-core performance, so frequency and IPC throughput clearly matter most. These results mirror what we found in Adobe's suite: mainly, Intel's Coffee Lake processors offer higher performance.
Productivity
The application start-up metric measures load-time snappiness in word processors, GIMP, and Web browsers, under warm- and cold-start conditions. Intel's Core i3-8350K scores well in the test, though the -7350K's 4.2 GHz clock rate also facilitates impressive performance. It even beats Core i5-8400.
Video conferencing measures performance in single- and multi-user applications that utilize the Windows Media Foundation for video playback and encoding. It also performs facial detection during the workload to model real-world usage. As you might imagine, cores and cache play a big role in determining the outcome of this benchmark. The Ryzen 5 1600 leads the default-configured CPUs, and overclocking improves its standing. A stock Ryzen 5 1500X leverages its eight threads to beat the stock Core i3-8350K, but they switch places after overclocking. Surprisingly, the Core i5-8400's two extra cores don't translate to a big lead over the -8350K.
The photo editing benchmark measures performance with Futuremark's binaries that use the ImageMagick library. A tuned Ryzen 5 1600 tops the chart again, though the overclocked -8350K lands in second place. It's not as fast at Intel's factory-set frequency, and AMD's Ryzen 5 1500X even scores a win over the stock -8350K. Similar to what we saw in the video conferencing test, Core i3-7350K shows us the liability of its dual-core design in heavily-threaded workloads.
A spreadsheet-heavy test emphasizes clock rates most, though we do see the impact of a less successful memory overclock from our tuned Ryzen 5 1400. It might be surprising to see Ryzen 3 1300X on top of the other Ryzen CPUs at stock settings, but it and the 1500X have the highest boost frequencies (4.7 GHz) of our AMD models.
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