We’ve been hearing quite a lot about the Ryzen 5 3500X lately, AMD’s rumored budget CPU which is supposedly incoming (alongside the Ryzen 5 3500), and now some benchmarks have been spilled showing that it outdoes the Core i5-9400F (with some illuminating non-comparative game benchmarking having been done, too).
This comes from a Chinese tech site (as spotted by Wccftech) which has apparently got hold of the Ryzen 5 3500X before anyone else and given the processor the full unboxing treatment in a video, alongside the aforementioned benchmarking.
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As with any such pre-release leak, we have to chuck the usual salt around, but reportedly the 3500X was tested running in an MSI B450M Mortar Max motherboard paired with a GTX 1660 (6GB) graphics card (with the PC having 16GB of DDR4 system RAM).
Various games were apparently tested at 1080p resolution, including Assassin’s Creed Odyssey where the 3500X managed to record an average of 65 fps or frames per second (and a minimum of 27 fps).
Shadow of the Tomb Raider witnessed a 77 fps average, with PUBG hitting 80 fps on average. In World War Z the processor managed an average 126 fps (with a minimum 109 fps), and League of Legends hit an average of 180 fps. As mentioned, all this was with a GTX 1660 GPU.
As we’ve been hearing, these allegedly incoming budget Ryzen processors are designed to take on Intel’s popular Core i5 9400F, and the Chinese site also did some comparative benchmarking with the latter.
In CPU-Z, the Ryzen 5 3500X achieved a single-core result of 476.3 compared to the Core i5 9400F’s score of 451.4. In multi-threaded, the result was 2,774.9 for AMD versus 2,568.2 for Intel (meaning the 3500X is about 5% and 8% faster, respectively).
Remember we’ve already seen some leaked presentation slides of game benchmarks (again with a GTX 1660) that show performance levels are pretty even between these AMD and Intel chips.
Productive offering
The Ryzen 3rd-gen chip was also victorious in some productivity benchmarking, again reportedly to the tune of around 5% – so the 3500X looks like a solid performance bump over the 9400F.
Of course, exactly how this rumored chip (and the vanilla 3500) will stack up against that rival Intel CPU very much depends on where AMD pitches the price.
The Core i5-9400F – which is a spin on the Core i5-9400 that ditches the integrated graphics to lower the price – can be had for about $140 (around £112, AU$206) these days.
And as we’ve previously theorized, the 3500X might cost a little more than that, perhaps hitting $150 (around £120, AU$221), although the Ryzen 5 3500 will likely undercut Intel’s price tag.
The plain Ryzen 5 3500 won’t be quite as quick as the 3500X, of course. While it allegedly runs with essentially the same specs – six-cores, six-threads, clocked at 3.6GHz with boost to 4.1GHz – it only has half the cache (16MB rather than 32MB), which will slow it down a bit in comparison.
Wccftech believes the Ryzen 5 3500X is about to go on sale (presumably in Asia?), but naturally that remains to be seen. We still haven’t had these budget Ryzen chips officially confirmed, yet.
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