 Ryzen 5. Many of you have been waiting, patiently or impatiently, for its big debut. Something which we have- Stop! What the- Stop! You're gonna get wrecked! Look at these comments! What is this? Who are you? I'm- I'm you! From the future! If you release this simulation of AMD Ryzen performance, everybody's going to hate you! Simulation? What simulation? I've got Ryzen 5 right here. No! You don't understand! I just- Wait. This is the review. Great Scott! I've gotta go! I set the dial wrong! Welcome, then, to our Ryzen 5 review. We're opening up a new merch store! You can check out some of our new gear today at the link in the video description. As we've mentioned before, AMD is aggressively targeting Intel in terms of core count and pricing, packing enthusiast features into their CPUs in order to undercut Intel's Core i5 and Core i7, with their appropriately named Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 CPUs. Whether they succeeded or not, we'll address a little bit later, because first we need some boring technical details. Both Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 5, which launches today, come with two of what AMD calls CPU Complex, or CCXs, which is four processing cores attached to eight megs of high-speed cache. These CCX units communicate with each other over an all-new bus that AMD calls Infinity Fabric. The difference between them is that Ryzen 5 comes with two or four individual cores disabled through a process called binning, whereby faulty or underperforming cores are shut off, then the chip is sold at a lower price. So if we line up our Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 CPUs, we can see that our 1600X is basically a cut down 1800X, while our 1500X is probably a cut down 1700 with tweaked clock speeds. What's unusual about AMD's approach here though, is that they've disabled the cores symmetrically to make hex core and quad core models. The disadvantage is that the quad core model may suffer some performance penalty for not having all of its cores on the same CCX, but the advantage is that every Ryzen 5 gets a massive 16 megabytes of cache. And all the other features are there too, precision boost, XFR, simultaneous multi-threading, neural net inspired branch prediction. So when you start to think about it then, how many cores do you really need? And if the answer is any fewer than eight, then Ryzen 5 starts to sound like a really good way to save a few bucks. Let's talk about the test. AMD included an MSI B350 Tomahawk motherboard in our testing kit, but we used our Crosshair 6 Hero instead for the sake of consistency. And on that subject, we actually retested all of our AMD chips with the latest BIOS revision and a new kit of G.Skill Flare X RAM, which means that we are finally able to give you guys results at DDR4 3200 speeds. Woo! This, along with the rest of our test stable, should give us a great picture of how Ryzen 5 stacks up. For extra credit, we also tested our Ryzen 5s with a 4 GHz overclock, the best that we could achieve on both of the chips with air cooling. Oh, and by the way, our simulated 1600X, we threw that in there too. Let's kick things off with gaming. Thanks to their native overclocking support, both of our Ryzen 5 chips managed to pull off some impressive numbers next to their Team Blue competitors, although it is worth noting that the 7600K can overclock too. Games like Rise of the Tomb Raider and Doom in OpenGL mode tend to devour instructions per clock, giving our Intel Bench as a lead, unless we overclock on Ryzen, which sometimes actually accounts for some major gains in performance here. Now that's weird. What gives? With Team Blue, your cache is generally going to remain at the same speed unless you overclock it separately. But as it turns out, Ryzen's cache just loves getting as much CPU time as it can, which favors their infinity fabric-connected CCX architecture, along with their high core counts. So, with many cores and higher clock speeds, AMD's cache actually becomes more efficient. How do we know? Because when we compared cache benchmarks between our stock and overclocked chips, we found major improvements, thanks to our overclocks, that look in line with the differences between the two chips' core counts. I mean, overclocking our 7700K? We saw performance fluctuate a bit, but nowhere near this much. So this seems to explain some of what we're seeing here in these gaming tests. Good news for AMD fans looking to overclock, then, because overclocking adds to multiple performance metrics. Speaking of which, in our synthetic tests, we can see that Ryzen continues to dominate Intel's mainstream platforms when it comes to multi-threaded performance. What's even more interesting about these results, however, is that the Ryzen 7 1700 frequently ends up matched by our overclocked 1600X, which becomes all the more impressive when you consider the performance per dollar that this translates to, thanks to the $80 price difference between the two chips. Speaking of performance per dollar, Team Red and Team Blue are neck and neck in this all-important metric. A small aside here, by the way, if you've been paying attention, our simulated Ryzen 5 1600X has also kept up very well with our real 1600X. Finally, let's talk about thermals, something we weren't able to simulate. Now that we're equipped with AMD's Wraith Max and Wraith Spire coolers, we can test our Ryzen 5 chips with both stock and aftermarket cooling. So for giggles, we threw our Spire on our overclocked 1600X and managed to maintain our performance at reasonable, if unexceptional, temperatures. So aftermarket cooling is still recommended for overclocking, even on Ryzen's 4 and 6 core variants. Which leads us to our conclusion then. Since its launch, AMD's new platform has been changing almost daily. We're constantly learning new things about how it does perform, how it's supposed to perform, and why. And with Ryzen 5, AMD's future becomes much clearer, thanks to software and firmware updates that continue to improve Ryzen's performance and stability. With these numbers and pricing, Intel may be starting to sweat a little bit. Remember too, that we used an X370 board, but you could save a fair bit on the platform overall, by stepping down to B350 if you don't need SLI, or even lower if you don't plan to overclock. Now to be clear, Ryzen doesn't overclock like crazy. The platform bugs aren't quite fully ironed out, and it still isn't the clear of far and away performance king that a lot of people wanted it to be. But what they have done, when you factor in the entire suite of tests, is deliver just as much bang for the buck as Team Blue right now. And that is a very good thing. Do you have two computers? Do you have two keyboards and two mice all over your desk, so that you can actually use aforementioned two computers? Well that's dumb, because synergy exists, and it allows you to share one mouse and one keyboard seamlessly between two or more computers. So you'll no longer confuse which one is for which, and which one goes with what one. It's awesome. They've got a basic and pro version with a one-time payment for lifetime access, and the features include clipboard sharing between the computers, dragging and dropping files between the computers, the ability to set up hotkeys, and more. It even works on Windows, Mac, and Linux! And you can use our link in the video description to save 25% on synergy today. So thanks for watching guys, if you disliked this video you can hit that button, but if you liked it, hit the like button, get subscribed, maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description. Also down there is our t-shirt store, which you should totally check out, and our community forum, which you should totally join.