AMD Ryzen 7 5800X Review

Zen 3 is here, and it is beautiful.

AMD is pulling out all the stops. Consider us all hyped up when the company gave a glimpse of Ryzen 5000 early last month. The Zen 3 reveal easily made the headlines - exciting time for gamers indeed. Fast forward to today and the Red Team finally sets the new generation of Ryzen loose for everyone. AMD sent us a Ryzen 7 5800X to put to the test, and we’re here to see if the hype is real. 

Exciting times ahead for us and AMD. The Zen 3 architecture is set to deliver leaps and bounds of improvement, a historic record in the Zen architecture with its 19% generational increase in IPC. Its unified complex design brings 8 cores and 32MB of L3 cache into a single group of resources to dramatically reduce core-to-core and core-to-cache latencies.

To top that off, the new AMD Radeon RX 6000 cards are on the horizon, and we’re very excited to see how it stands against the competition when it hits the market. But then again, let's net get too ahead of ourselves and focus on what's in front of us for now. Onwards to the review.

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS

# of Cores	8
# of Threads	16
Base Clock	3.8GHz
Max Boost Clock	Up to 4.7GHz
Total L2 Cache	4MB
Total L3 Cache	32MB
Unlocked	Yes
CMOS	TSMC 7nm FinFET
Thermal Solution	Not included
Default TDP	105W

TEST SYSTEM SETUP

Motherboard	X570 AORUS MASTER
CPU	AMD Ryzen 7 5800X
GPU	AMD Radeon RX 5700XT
RAM	ZADAK 16GB DDR4 3600MHz
Cooler	Noctua NH-D15 chromax.black
Storage	Plextor M9Pe(G) NVMe 512GB M.2 SSD + Western Digital Green HDD 2TB
PSU	CORSAIR RM750 80 Plus Gold
Case	Thermaltake P3
OS	Windows 10 Pro
Monitor	ViewSonic VX2758 1080p 144Hz Monitor

Cinebench R20 and Cinebech R15

Cinebench is a real-world cross-platform test suite that evaluates your computer's hardware capabilities. Improvements to Cinebench Release 20 reflect the overall advancements to CPU and rendering technology in recent years, providing a more accurate measurement of Cinema 4D's ability to take advantage of multiple CPU cores and modern processor features available to the average user. Best of all: It's free.

3DMark Time Spy

3DMark Time Spy is a DirectX 12 benchmark test for Windows 10 gaming PCs. Time Spy is one of the first DirectX 12 apps to be built the right way from the ground up to fully realize the performance gains that the new API offers. With its Extreme counterpart rendering visuals in 4K. CPU Score and GPU Score are logged separately for more information.

3DMark Firestrike

Fire Strike is a showcase DirectX 11 benchmark for modern gaming PCs. Its ambitious real-time graphics are rendered with detail and complexity far beyond other DirectX 11 benchmarks and games. With Extreme and Ultra versions raising resolution in 25650 x 1440 and 4K.

Blender Benchmark 

The Blender Benchmark Tool runs blender and renders on several production files, and the Open Data portal on blender.org, where the results will be (optionally) uploaded. Our tests will include bmw27, classroom, and fish_cat.

Death Stranding

Death Stranding by Kojima Productions is just a marvelous game graphically and narratively. Beautiful stuff, Kojima. 

Gears 5

Gears 5 is the latest installment in The Coalition's Gears of War franchise. It's a third person shooter that features a cover-system mechanic and a mini-game reload mechanic. It also features an exact 1-minute benchmark that we're going to use for our data.

Settings:

API: DirectX 12

Ultra Settings Preset

Min/Max Frame Rate: None/Unlimited

Character Texture Detail: Ultra

Effects Texture Detail: Ultra

Dynamic Shadow Quality: Ultra

World Texture Detail: Ultra

Texture Streaming: Ultra

Capsule Shadow Quality: Ultra

Screen Space Reflections: Ultra

Ambient Occlusion Quality: Ultra

World Level of Detail: Ultra

Tesselation Quality: Ultra

Animation Quality: Best

Shadow of the Tomb Raider

Shadow of the Tomb Raider is the latest Tomb Raider title from Crystal Dynamics. It features a built-in benchmark tool, which is also available in the demo version so you can try it out for yourself, too. It also features Ray Tracing and DLSS, both of which we're not going to use for parity across the board.

Settings:

API: DirectX 12

Ultra Settings Preset

Min/Max Frame Rate: None/Unlimited

Character Texture Detail: Ultra

Effects Texture Detail: Ultra

Dynamic Shadow Quality: Ultra

World Texture Detail: Ultra

Texture Streaming: Ultra

Capsule Shadow Quality: Ultra

Screen Space Reflections: Ultra

Ambient Occlusion Quality: Ultra

World Level of Detail: Ultra

Tesselation Quality: Ultra

Animation Quality: Best

CPU-Z

CPU-Z is a handy tool that lets users view information regarding their systems from CPU, Cache, Mainboard, Memory, SPD and Graphics. It also features a benchmark tool that tests Single Thread and Multi Thread performance.

wPrime

wPrime tests your processor performance by calculating square roots with a recursive call of Newton's method for estimating functions. 1024M and 32M scores are recorded.

Temperature

With our Noctua NH-D15 chromax.black, our temperature tests are done with the system idle in the first 30 minutes after boot up, and afterwards a load test of Prime95 on loop for another 30 minutes.

CONCLUSION

The AM4 roadmap has been phenomenal throughout its conquest. Giving gamers a great upgrade path upon their decision to tread it. The 500 series as I've checked from different manufacturers have their respective BIOS updates ready, and those with an AMD 400 series motherboard would likely see their BIOS update starting January of next year.

Ryzen’s momentum over the past couple of years have been astounding. Jumping on the AM4 bandwagon brought plenty of surprises for everyone. AMD brought about Ryzen in 2017 to disrupt the market, and it has definitely come a long way. The company has gone all out, offering a product stack that’s set on facing the competition at every level.

AMD’s Ryzen 7 5800X is here to replace the Ryzen 7 3800X, and it’s such a shame we weren’t able to get our hands on one to test one out to see the gains. Whatever the case, we work with what we have here, and as it stands, the Ryzen 7 5800X flexes on our benchmarks. Now, this also serves as a great opportunity for us to explore our tests further.

We’re pleased to see how AMD brings plenty to the table with each iteration of its Ryzen CPUs, and we’re even happier to see how the new series of graphics cards are bringing the fight to NVIDIA. AMD is fighting a war on two fronts. Competition is great.