The Ryzen 7 5800X; Sweet Spot Or Aim Higher?

Those Ryzen 9’s Look Great, But What About Lucky 7?

Zen 3 has arrived, in the form of the Ryzen 9 5950X and 5900X, the Ryzen 7 5800X and the Ryzen 5 5600X; ranging in price from $800US for the 5950X down to $300 for the 5600X.  Well, they would be that price if they didn’t seem to have pretty much sold out instantly, much like all the other good hardware in 2020.

You can skip straight down to check out the results of the Ryzen 9 processors, or you could first drop by TechSpot to see how the  $450 Ryzen 7 5800X compares to it’s more expensive brethren.  The comparison also includes previous Ryzen CPUs, Comet Lake and Coffee Lake, in case you are looking for direct comparisons to your current machine. 

For those doing rendering or development work, the premium is worth it, as the Ryzen 9’s stomp all over the competition and even in scientific calculations the Ryzen 9 5950X challenges Intel’s i9-10900K lead, though it doesn’t quite surpass it.   The big exception would be MP3 encoding, where Intel continues to hold a commanding lead; for other encoding tasks the Ryzen 7 5800X is in the top five.

When looking at gaming at 1440p, there is no real reason to go above that Ryzen 7 5800X, as it is in a dead heat with the Ryzen 9’s in most tests, even the Ryzen 5 5600X provides a similar experience.  There are still some games where Comet Lake processors offer one to three more FPS, but at a noticeable cost.   In 4K gaming the story is similar, a high end Intel CPU will get you two or three more FPS, while there is essentially no performance difference whatsoever between the Zen 3 CPUs.

If you had thought it would be an easy decision as to which new Ryzen 5000 to go with, you should take a closer look at these results and you might just change your mind.