AMD Ryzen 9 5900X and AMD Ryzen 7 5800X in Review: AMD dethrones Intel as Fastest Gaming CPU

AMD’s inception of their Ryzen 3000-series brought new life to the CPU market. For the first time you could get a 16-core CPU that fit into an AM4 socket. In regard of performance these new CPUs were mostly running laps around Intel’s processors in multi-core scenarios where they miles ahead their competition. However, single-core performance remained a sore point, and Intel continued to sell the fastest gaming CPU available and managed to raise that bar even further with the Intel Core i9-10900K by sacrificing energy efficiency for extra single-core performance. AMD, in return, continued to optimize its Zen 3 architecture, which brings updated load and store units that, combined with the cache, are much more powerful than before. On paper, Zen 3 is supposed to offer a 19 % higher IPC than Zen 2. At least in part responsible for this performance increase are the noticeably improved bandwidth and lower latencies. The Infinity Fabric, the connector between the CPU dies and the I/O die, runs at up to 2,000 MHz now resulting in an optimal RAM speed of 4,000 MHz.

Visually, not much changed on the CPU dies. A Zen 3 CCX now contains eight cores where before there were only four. Each core has access to 32 MB of L3 cache. The I/O die remained unchanged and, unlike the 7 nm CPU dies, continues to be manufactured in a 12 nm process. The next step in lithography evolution, the 5 nm manufacturing process, is expected to arrive with Zen 4.

Unlike Intel AMD did not have to increase TDP ratings by any significant amount, and the new Vermeer CPUs are therefore compatible with existing 500-series chipsets. Compared to Intel’s Core i9-10900K’s power consumption of up to 250 W AMD’s new CPU are significantly more energy efficient.

Additional benchmarks can be found here.

So far, Intel made the fastest gaming CPU available. Thanks to the new Ryzen 5000-series, this honor now goes to AMD instead. Let’s start with the synthetic benchmarks: both, the Ryzen 9 5900X and the Ryzen 7 5800X managed to beat their respective predecessors. However, Intel’s Comet Lake S processor continues to outperform AMD’s CPUs by single digit margins.

This changes completely when we take a look at our game benchmarks. Zen 3 manages to outperform Intel’s Intel Core i9-10900K by up to 20 %. The higher resolution and details the lower the difference between the two competitors. Nevertheless, both our review samples performed exceptionally well when paired with the Nvidia Titan RTX. The difference compared to previous Ryzen 3000-series processors is immense, and somewhere between 10 and 40 % depending on game.