PC World - USA (2020-12)

116 PCWorld DECEMBER 2020

FEATURE SHOULD YOU UPGRADE TO A RYZEN 5000?

harder to perceive in actual experience. If, for

example, you’re running a task in Microsoft

Office that takes 3 seconds on a 1000-series

Ryzen, will you really feel like your world was

rocked if it takes 1.5 seconds with a

5000-series Ryzen? On the other hand, if it’s a

painful 30-second file conversion using some

old legacy application that you can cut down

to 15 seconds—then yes, it might be worth it

to you.

For a lot of people using 3000-series

Ryzen parts, moving to a new Ryzen 5000 for

mostly single-threaded tasks will yield better

performance, but probably not the best

return on investment for a direct upgrade. A

2000-series Ryzen or 1000-user however, will

definitely yield very good returns from an

upgrade.

BUT WHAT ABOUT

GAMING?

The one big caveat to all of this is gaming

performance. With the Ryzen 5000, AMD

has finally pulled ahead of Intel in gaming.

You may see anywhere from 5- to

20-percent better gaming performance

going from a 2000-series part to Ryzen

5000. You might see that in a few games
      with Ryzen 3000, too.
      If you’re ready to jump in with both feet
      from hearing this news, keep in mind that
      you need to pair the CPU with a very fast
      and very expensive GPU, and also play at
      lower resolutions with the aim of high

refresh rates. That’s because at higher

resolutions, most games are bottlenecked

by the graphics card, and the CPU’s

influence on game performance decreases

greatly.

Take, for example, a PC used for gaming

80 percent of the time, configured for playing

games at 4K resolution. If we were to

configure it with a Ryzen 7 2700X and

GeForce RTX 3080, or a Ryzen 7 5800X with

a GeForce RTX 3070, the latter is the

preferred configuration most of the time.

Cinebench R15 nT

Multi-threaded performance

LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE

Ryzen 9 5950X Vermeer16/32

Ryzen 9 3950X Matisse16/32

Ryzen 9 5900X Vermeer12/24

Ryzen 9 3900XT Matisse12/24

Ryzen 9 3900X Matisse12/24

Ryzen 7 5800X Vermeer8/16

Ryzen 7 3800X Matisse8/16

Ryzen 7 3700X Matisse8/16

Ryzen 5 5600X Vermeer 6/12

Ryzen 7 2700X Pinnacle Edge8/16

Ryzen 7 3600X Matisse6/12

Ryzen 7 1800X Summit Ridge8/16

Ryzen 7 1700X Summit Ridge8/16

Ryzen 5 2600X Pinnacle Edge6/12

4,036

4,531

3,253

3,74 9

2,611

3,201

2,14 4

2,165

1,822

1,970

1,6 0 6

1,6 47

1,380

1, 561

4th generation (Ryzen 5000)

2nd generation (Ryzen 2000)

3rd generation (Ryzen 3000)

1st generation (Ryzen 1000)