DECEMBER 2020 PCWorld 117SHOULD YOU UPGRADE
YOUR RYZEN FOR MULTI-
CORE PERFORMANCE?
Another big reason to consider upgrading
your Ryzen is multi-core performance.
That’s the house Ryzen was built on, and
we can say there is a lot of value to doing
an upgrade—if you’re coming from the
right place.
Cinebench’s
multi-core
benchmark
results, for
example, suggest
the performance
you could see in
similar heavy-duty
applications such as
3D modelling, video
editing, and most
workstation-level tasks
that tend to scale well
with increases in core
count.
If you look at the
chart from a distance,
you can see the
impressive strides AMD
has made with every
generation. From the original ground-
breaking Ryzen 7 1800X in 2017 to the Ryzen
9 5950X in 2020, multi-core performance
has jumped by 182 percent.
Unlike single-threaded tasks, where even
a 20-percent increase probably won’t be felt
most of the time, multi-core tasks tend to take
longer, and the yields from increasing core
count is more noticeable.
If, for example, you’re doing an encode
on your 8-core Ryzen 7 1800X and the
encoder scales with core count (as most
modern ones do), you could potentially
cut an encode from 2 hours to 45 minutes
by moving to a new 16-core Ryzen 9
5950X. If you’re doing 3D
modelling, the speedups
would typically be huge
as well.
So yes, generally
moving to the latest
Ryzen 5000 will yield
huge returns. Before
you start your hunt,
realize that while
Ryzen 5000 is
impressive, the
returns aren’t as
impressive if
you already
have a high-core
count chip.
For example, if you have a
16-core Ryzen 9 3950X, moving to a
16-core Ryzen 9 5950X isn’t going to rock
your world. But going from an 8-core
Ryzen 7 3700X to a 12-core Ryzen 9
5900X will indeed give you that multi-core
oomph you’re looking for.