CPU Performance

Well, what we are all here for it to see just how well the new Ryzen 2000 Series CPUs perform right? Well before jumping into that I want to touch a little more on my testing, beyond what you can find in the previous section. In addition to testing just the two CPUs that AMD sent. I did a LOT of retesting as well because of meltdown and spectra, I wanted to be sure I had good comparison numbers. I retested the 8700K and 8400 and all of the original Ryzen CPUs except the 1700 that sadly I had trouble with and couldn’t complete the retests. The AMD CPUs were tested with the provided (3400MHz) memory and Intel was tested with our normal memory so there is a performance difference there so please keep that in mind.

Anyhow for our first test, I jumped into X264 HD Benchmark. This tests the FPS when video encoding so higher is better here. So the 2700X still hasn’t caught up to Intel’s high-end high core count CPUs or the 8700K and 7700K but it is highly improved over the Ryzen 1 CPUs. Both the 2600X and 2700X outperformed ALL of the other Ryzen CPUs but 40 FPS or more.

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Next, I went with my favorite benchmark. I like Cinebench because I can test both with a single core and with all of the cores to get a good look at the performance you can expect with old single-threaded software and new multi-threaded programs. In the Multi-Core test the 2700X topped the AMD CPUs and even came in a little above the 6900K but the higher core count Skylake-X CPUs still came out on top. It's important to note here that the 8700K and the 2600X were going blow for blow in that test as well. Now in the single core test, the Intel mainstream lineup is still at the top by a large margin. The improvements from the Ryzen 1 to Ryzen 2000 Series CPUs is big though, from in the mid to high 150’s to low 170’s. That is a big jump in a year.

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Now, this was a new test that I added because I noticed a lot of people have been posting up CPUz benchmarks recently. As a bonus, it also does the same multi-threaded and single-threaded tests that I love Cinebench for. So you can see all of the CPUs I retested here. The 2700X dominated the multi-threaded test, of course, I haven’t put the high core count Intel’s through it yet either. But I like seeing it being up above the 1800X by a good amount. The 2600X and 8700K are once again trading blows and were within just 8 points of each other. Once again the 8700K was at the top of the single thread chart and I didn’t get to retest the 7700K to see if it would be as well. But the two Ryzen 2000 Series CPUs are up above everything else.

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Next, I got into math based benchmarks like wPrime and 7-Zip. In wPrime the lower the number the better and as you can see the 2700X did really well, with the 7900X about 10 seconds faster and being tied with the 7820X. Given the price tag on that 8 core CPU, I would consider that a win. The 2600X came in 8 seconds behind the 8700K and 10 faster than the 1600X. The 2700X is still the star of the show here with its 2 extra cores but the 2600X is holding its own. In 7-Zip it was more of the same. The 8700K was faster than the 2600X, by a larger margin this time. Then the 2700X was behind that $500 7820X.

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So Jetstream is a benchmark I’ve been toying around with for a while. This is a Java/HTML5 test that runs through a whole list of standard tests in a browser. It averages out the score then does it all over again two more times to average out the score again. This shows what you can expect for normal browser performance, aka what most people do the most on their computers. The funny thing about this test though is sometimes you get results that don’t make a lot of sense but are repeatable. The testing is solid, but its clear that high core counts don’t always help with day to day performance. The Intel CPUs as a whole dominate this test with the 4 core models up top and the high dollar high core count CPUs at the bottom but still above all of the Ryzen CPUs. The same happens in the Ryzen CPUs as well. The 2700X did really well here, but notice that 1300X randomly up near it.

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Next, I get into Passmarks Performance Test 9. Rather than have our GPU or storage effect the results I run just the CPU tests to get an overall CPU score. Here the higher core counts help as you can see the 2700X is up just below all of Intel’s Skylake-X CPUs. The 8700K is below the 2700X but well above the 2600X due to its higher individual core speeds.

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Next, we have PCMark 10, I like this test because while technically a synthetic benchmark they have a lot of real world based tests in it. They run browser and video tests like you would use a PC every day. Test image editing, word processing, and excel. Then they toss in a few gaming tests as well. It is basically exactly what I do every day. So how did Ryzen 2000 Series do? Well, the 8700K and 7700K are still at the top, as are all of the Skylake-X CPUs. But the 2700X did improve over the previous 1800X performance. It is right in between to of the most unlikely of CPUs, the 8400 and the 7980XE, Intel’s current most expensive and one of their cheapest as well. The 2600X was down a few more.

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Now I can finally start to get a look at potential gaming performance with 3dMark and Dolphin 5.0. Dolphin is a Gamecube and Wii emulator and emulators are very CPU dependent. Here a lower score is better because these are the number of seconds it took to complete the benchmark. So both the 2600X and 2700X are right in the middle of the pack. Again the high-end mainstream and high-end Skylake-X CPUs dominate. The 2700X came in behind the 6900K, but the gap between them was significant. There was the i5-7640K than the 2600X behind that. The two Ryzen 2000 Series CPUs are well ahead of all of the older Ryzen CPUs though. Then in 3DMark, I used the base Fire Strike focusing on the CPU specific Physics Score and here the 2700X is up closer to the top with the 2600X near the middle. The 2600X was behind the 8700K and the 2700X was up in the mix with all of the high core count Intel Skylake-X’s.

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Okay finally, we can see how things have improved in gaming. Ryzen, when it launched, struggled when gaming. AMD did a good job of getting some improvements with windows updates and working with some of the game manufactures. But remember all of our Ryzen results other than the 1700 are retested with these improvements and with faster memory. You can see how the 1700 is back behind in all four games I tested in. But what about the 2600X and 2700X? Well in Ashes of the Singularity the 2700X did really well, outperforming the 7700K even and between the Intel patches and Ryzen improvements the 8700K and 2700X were 3 FPS apart. The 2600X, however, was farther down. In Wildlands the numbers are even better, the two Ryzen 2000 Series CPUs are up just below the two new Intel CPUs at the top. Going old school in TF2 the 2600X and 2700X are right in the middle. TF2 is very CPU dependent but not as good with multi-threading so good individual core performance is more important here. Then last but not least is Deus Ex, once again the Ryzen 2000 Series CPUs are right in the middle. Here the Intel CPUs are all bunched up at the top and the Ryzen CPUs are down at the bottom but the gap between them all isn’t very large save for the R3 1200/R3 2200G. So what’s the verdict on gaming? Well its going to take a LOT more tests than what is in our CPU test suite, but it looks like Ryzen is slowly making up the difference. AMD hasn’t caught up yet, at least in our tests, but I like seeing the 2700X and 2600X up in the top half of the charts.

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For my last round of test, I ran a few tests in AIDA64. I like to check out the cache and memory performance and just for fun, I include single and double precision and IOPS tests. What I wanted to see here was if there really was an improvement in the L1, L2, and L3 cache like AMD suggested in their press deck.  Specifically in latency and there was. The L3 latency especially is actually faster on these two Ryzen 2000 Series CPUs than anything else tested. Memory speeds improved and are now much higher than the 8700K (with slower memory). L1 cache speeds on Intel are still in a different class, but Ryzen 2000 Series kept up or bested Intel in all of the other tests. As for single and double precision, the 2700X is faster than any of the other Ryzen CPUs but Intel is still way ahead there as well, same in Integer IOPS.

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