AMD
RYZEN 5 1600X
http://www.amd.com £240
Six cores and 12 threads make this a heavy hitter. Well, sort of. It’s hard to ignore just how much of an
incredible proposition Ryzen is to any looking at joining the ranks of streamers and people who make
videos across the globe. But what about gaming? That’s Ryzen’s Achilles heel, right?The answer isn’t as easy as the majority of fanboys
would believe. Ryzen has problems. Specifically at
higher framerates (120+), stuttering in older titles
that no longer have developer support. Ultimately,
each Ryzen processor will operate from multiple
core complexes (two, in fact). Each complex is
capable of housing four individual cores that can
communicate with one another. The latencies
within each complex are low, but as soon as
Windows starts scheduling processes
across both complexes, latency increases,
in turn creating irregularities.That said, Ryzen is fine in developer-supported
titles, at high-res and lower framerates. If you’re
looking to game at 1440p or 4K, Ryzen is only few
frames behind its competition.
The 1600X is a jack of all trades; it presents 12
threads of power at a phenomenal price. It feels like
we’d be doing you a disservice suggesting you buy
anything other than Ryzen today.BASE/TURBO CLOCK: 3.6GHZ / 4.0GHZ / CORES/THREADS: 6/12 /
LITHOGRAPHY: 14NM / CACHE: 20MB / MEMORY SUPPORT: 64GB DDR4
@ 2666MHZ / MAX PCIE LANES: 20CPU90 %
1
CORE COUNT
More cores and
more threads make
Ryzen the king when it
comes to Twitch
streaming and video
content creation.2
OVERCLOCKING
The overclocking
situation is still a little
lacklustre on this one.
You can crank all four
cores up to 4GHz.3
PRICE
At £240, the Intel
equivalent to
Ryzen is the Core
i5-7600K, a four-core,
four-thread processor.
For a total of a third of
the processing power.4
FUTURE
PROOFING
The six cores, solid
single-core performance,
and hefty chipset should
sort you out for the next
four to five years.Hardware
REVIEWS