 It's with a heavy heart that we now pay respects to a friend who has touched all of our lives and our wallets. A friend who stuck by our side whether we wanted it or not and never really changed. The devastating loss of Intel's performance leadership in gaming leaves a void that for many of us won't be easy to fill. But friends, don't be blue. Because there's always team red! Smart Deploy allows IT departments to re-image any computer model from a single golden image. Search the library for your model and grab your exclusive free licenses worth over $800 at smartdeploy.com slash minus. Intro Four CPUs are launching today. The Ryzen 5950X, Ryzen 9 5900X, and Ryzen 7 5800X, well there's one of those too. Curiously, no non-X CPUs have even been announced just yet, but these all coincide with their 3000 series namesakes in terms of core count and market position. AMD did make one tweak to the lineup though. Every skew but the Ryzen 5 5600X has received a $50 price bump placing it firmly above Intel commanding a premium. This threw a lot of folks for a loop after the announcement and now we can finally answer the question. Can they do that? Our test setup is a bit more extensive than usual because we're packing in all four new CPUs, four of their predecessors, and three team blue CPUs to mark this potentially momentous occasion. Getting right to business, when compared against our Ryzen 3000 series chips, it's clear that in games there is a major performance advantage with the 5000 series. In fact, that advantage tends to hover around 20%, extremely close to AMD's claimed 19% instructions per clock performance uplift. And this is especially true in notoriously CPU-bound games like Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020. Same goes for GTA V, CS GO, heck, even Civilization 6 has turn times that are roughly five seconds faster. Doesn't matter what game it is, the Ryzen 5000 series is significantly faster compared to the last gen. But none of this is a surprise. I mean, obviously AMD wouldn't release a new product if it was worse than their old one. We don't talk about that. Usually that doesn't happen. So then how does Ryzen 5000 stack up against team blue? Ladies and gentlemen, they got them. Even the Ryzen 5 5600X, a CPU that costs 300 US dollars beat every single one of Intel CPUs more often than it lost. And where it did lose, it was within a few percentage points. These are all games that are traditionally CPU-bound and holy s**t. Would you look at that performance in CS GO? That is over 200 more frames per second. Dr. Sue, please, they're already dead. Stop kicking them. Kick over to lttstore.com for a sweet CPU pins t-shirt instead. It's Ryzen inspired, designed to stylish and nerdy at the same time. For the love of, well, that's good. Lttstore.com. Moving on. Productivity is Ryzen's traditional stomping ground and well, what can I say? This guy stomps. Look at these single threaded Cinebench scores. Only the 5600X, the lowest in the new lineup falls below 600 points. And for reference, a Core i9 10900K scores a measly 535. AMD continues to flex all over, not only their previous generation, but Team Blue's entire lineup with the Ryzen 7 5800X meeting or beating Intel's Core i9, even in multi-threaded workloads like POV Ray, our Mozilla Firefox compile test, and Blender. Only V-Ray and Corona renderer were any kinder to Intel and even that lead quickly evaporated when we introduced the cost competitor Ryzen 9 5900X to the mix to say nothing of the 16 Core 5950X. Intel just cannot catch a break here. And if you were wondering whether their upcoming Rocket Lake CPUs are going to help, well, after doing some rough napkin math here, if we assume Rocket Lake's performance will be between 10 and 20% higher than 10th gen, that basically brings us back to status quo. So assuming that Intel can keep Core clocks as high as they are now, the best case scenario is that Intel will get back their gaming performance throne, but because they are losing two cores on the top end skew, that means that anywhere that thread count is a factor, Intel's claimed IPC uplift is unlikely to make up the difference. So at a minimum then, AMD has the gaming crown for a couple of months and will continue to absolutely pulverize Intel in productivity even after the 11th gen launch. I mean, this is something that we haven't seen in well over a decade now. Clearly then, surely this comes at some sort of major cost and power consumption or thermal output, right? Right? Wrong. Check this out. Under the same blender workload, we are bang on between all of our 3000 and 5000 series CPUs with none of the pairs appreciably hotter than the other. Not only that, the 5000 series CPUs maintained roughly the same or even higher core clocks throughout the test. That means the improvements in performance mostly came straight from improvements in core architecture. Power consumption bizarrely seems to be actually down a bit for Ryzen 5000 with each CPU drawing at worst the same or at best a little bit less juice from the socket than 3000 series. And that means we can corroborate AMD's claims that they are literally not drawing so much as a single watt more. This really is an incredible achievement. As for how they got here, AMD claims that all of this was done through pure engineering. And there's a lot to talk about here, starting with the demise of the compute complex as we know it. Now they're still called CCXs, but they're not partitioned into groups of four cores anymore. And every eight core die is now able to access its full level three cache without having to deal with the extra latency involved in splitting it up. This is a big part of what gives AMD such a massive boost in performance because as we're well aware by now, Zen loves fast memory and Zen 3 is no exception. So having a unified pool of cache memory means that Ryzen 5000 can more effectively feed all the cores all the time. And that's not all. AMD tweaked their branch predictor and their operation queue. And the TLDR of that is that the CPU can do more per clock and there's less of a penalty for it having to back up and redo work if it mispredicts something. And beyond just Ryzen 5000 itself, AMD's upcoming Radeon 6000 series GPUs will be able to work with these CPUs with a feature that they're calling smart access memory, which will allow a Ryzen CPU to access all 16 gigs of a Radeon 6000 series GPUs memory, in some cases providing a major speed up. Now we are eager to test this out for ourselves once those cards launch, so make sure that you get subscribed so you don't miss it. As for compatibility, AMD says that Ryzen 5000 CPUs will be compatible with motherboards using 400 series chipsets as well as the recommended 500 series chipsets. You'll need to wait though for a BIOS update in order to use one of these new Zen 3 CPUs in an older board. And unfortunately for early adopters and thrift seekers, 300 series motherboards are officially unsupported. Makes sense I guess, I mean early first gen Ryzen boards had some issues and they can't guarantee anything at this point. And frankly, AMD has still done pretty okay with intergenerational compatibility for the most part, especially compared to Intel's hard and fast two generations of CPU, two generations of boards, and then you're done. Bottom line then, if Ryzen 3000 was Ryzen matured, Ryzen 5000 is a continuation of that. I mean we experienced no weird stability issues even right at launch and it also marks AMD's return to the upper echelon of desktop CPU performance. Intel by contrast outright missed the holiday season this year and if AMD is able to further refine the next big Ryzen CPU for TSMC's shiny new 5nm Ryzen CPU, for TSMC's shiny new 5nm process, Intel's holiday next year isn't gonna look much better. Like to be clear, it's not all about nanometers. Nvidia famously squeezed a full generation of extra performance without changing process nodes when they released Maxwell in 2014 and doi, AMD just did it today on TSMC's 7nm. But Rocket Lake is gonna be pushing Intel's geriatric 14 nanometer node to its freaking limit unless something really surprising happens. So it's a big win. Here's the podium. The only reason that I would advise you not to pull the trigger is if you get Mondo buyer's remorse when you buy new stuff and it gets replaced by something way better a short time later because Intel and AMD's leapfrog game looks to be heating up, not slowing down. I just hope that AMD's supply can keep up with the demand. Just like I hope you can keep up with my segue to our sponsor, Black Backblaze. Backblaze is a cloud storage solution that's easy to use and affordable starting at just $6 a month. With Backblaze, you can back up your personal and or business data and you can even use it as a B2 storage solution. Over 50 billion files have been restored and over an exabyte of data has been stored with Backblaze. You can back up almost anything, restore your files anywhere using their mobile app, and you can even restore by mail. That's right, if your internet is slow, you can purchase a restore via hard drive and they will overnight FedEx it to you. 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