Ryzen 5 vs. Core i5: Ryzen 5 1600X wins for best mainstream power CPU
AMD’S $250 RYZEN 5 1600X (go.pcworld.com/ryzen51600xamz) is here to challenge Intel’s quad-core, $250 Core i5-7600K for the honor of being “The People’s CPU.” Everyone likes to read about expensive, gold-plated, $1,000 parts, but in the real world, most people can’t or won’t spend that much and are looking for the best price-to-performance ratio.
AMD’s Ryzen 5 1600X will compete head-on with Intel’s Core 5-7600K in the all-important $250 CPU category.
While Ryzen 5 1600X may not have clock speeds as high as the Core i5-7600K’s, it does offer additional cores and virtual cores. We’ve run a battery of benchmarks to see if those cores will make up the difference.
Meet Ryzen 5
AMD actually announced four Ryzen 5 CPUs last month. Two of them are quad-cores with SMT (simultaneous multithreading): The $169 Ryzen 5 1400 and the $189 Ryzen 5 1500X. The last two are six-core chips with SMT: The $219 Ryzen 5 1600 and the $249 Ryzen 5 1600X
All are based on the same die used in the upscale Ryzen 7 lineup we’ve already reviewed, but they have cores switched off.
The one of most interest to us is the Ryzen 5 1600X. With its list price of $249, it maps almost perfectly to the Core i5-7600K, which has a current list price of $242 and has sat around at $250 for much of its life.
The six-core and quad-core Ryzen CPUs are
