The AMD Ryzen bandwagon has been raging at blistering pace for weeks and now that the furor over the Ryzen 7 trio release of 8-core/16-thread CPUs is abating, we have what is likely to be the most interesting and exciting launch to come - the Ryzen 5 CPUs. AMD has today officially announced four Ryzen 5 CPUs, ranging from £169 to $249, with a mix of four and six cores.
Ryzen 5 announced
AMD Ryzen 5 CPU range.
Data courtesy of AMD. Image Credit: Antony LeatherInterestingly, the range is slightly different to previous rumors, although the flagship 1600X remains the same and is actually even cheaper than the rumors suggested at $249 as opposed to $259. It still has the 4GHz boost clock and 3.6GHz base clock, which means that anywhere that more than six cores aren't fully utilized, it will likely perform similarly to the much more expensive Ryzen 7-series CPUs.
However, with many reviews pointing at the Ryzen 7 1700 as the bargain of the top-tier trio, usually overclocking to similar speeds as its more expensive siblings, the same could be true of the Ryzen 5 1600 and 1400. The former is also a six-core part like the 1600X, but costs $30 less and has a lower TDP, while the 1400 costs just $169, which is $20 cheaper than the 1500X. AMD is meant to be speed-binning Ryzen CPUs, but it's still a bit of a lottery as to how far you'll be able to overclock them. This is why many have opted for the X-series CPUs as they offer higher frequencies out of the box.
AMD has stated a launch date less than a month away too:
Following the successful introduction of AMD Ryzen™ 7 desktop processors, AMD today announced Ryzen™ 5 desktop processors will launch worldwide on April 11, 2017, offering disruptive price-to-performance for gamers and creators.
Tips for building a better AMD Ryzen System
AMD has posted a guide in its community forum highlighting numerous ways to tune a Ryzen system for better performance. It covers tips such as updating your motherboard's BIOS, picking the correct memory speed, adjusting Windows power plans and even overclocking.
Memory speeds have been a major issue for many reviewers, with most unable to get memory kits above 3,000MHz, even though they're rated much higher than this. In fact, some have resigned to testing Ryzen CPUs and motherboards with 2,133MHz or 2,400MHz memory - Ryzen seems to love faster memory speeds so the fact that motherboards appear to be evry selective on memory compatibility at the moment is likely holding back performance. Intel systems are much less picky and support far higher frequencies.
One issue that many are grappling with, however, is power plans. AMD recommends that you use the high performance power plan in Windows to ensure that all CPU cores are available for thread scheduling and are not 'parked' in an idle state. Using lower power plans can result in additional latency when unparking them. However, many users have found that XFR appears to be reduced and single-threaded performance hindered unless the balanced plan is used,
XFR stands for Extended Frequency Range - AMD's additional frequency boost that depends on your system's cooling, but can further boost the frequency of up to two CPU cores. This can help in lightly-threaded workloads. I tested this myself and found it to be absolutely right - if you enable the high performance plan, single-threaded performance falls, but multi-threaded performance increases as you can see in the benchmark below.
There was a 2% rise in single-threaded performance using the balanced power plan, while using the high performance plan saw multi-threaded performance rise by less than 1% compared to the balanced plan. Given how so many applications are still mostly reliant on one core, this does suggest that AMD needs to do some tweaking here, perhaps enabling full XFR at the same time as ensuring all CPU cores are available for thread scheduling to get the best of both worlds.
Temperatures
Of the three AMD CPUs, the Ryzen 7 1700 appeared to be a very cool cookie. It seemed to operate at much lower temperatures than the other two Ryzen CPUs, but in reality there's a reason for this - it isn't. AMD announced in another community update that to ensure a consistent cooling fan policy across all its CPUs, those in the X-series, such as the Ryzen 7 1700X and 1800X are actually reported as being 20°C hotter than the 1700.
Most temperature monitoring programs aren't taking this fact into account yet, so the likelihood is if you own an X-series Ryzen CPU, you'll need to manually deduct 20°C from the temperature to find the actual reading. This is important for anyone overclocking or tinkering with their system's cooling - your CPU is probably not as hot as you think it is.
I'll hopefully be looking at the Ryzen 5 CPUs shortly after they launch so watch this space and as always feel free to comment below or on social media.
