After years of anticipating their release, it'southward hard for me to believe that AMD's Zen-based Ryzen CPUs only arrived a month ago. Frankly, I've never seen and then much drama unfold so quickly in the tech customs -- what an exciting time to be a PC enthusiast!

Every bit we brainstorm to recover from the roller coaster ride that was Ryzen 7, we at present accept Ryzen five to address. Getting the ball rolling, AMD has appear four models in its more than affordable series, including a pair of six-cadre CPUs also as two quad-core models.

The 1600X is configured similarly to the Core i7-6800K and stands as the flagship of AMD's Ryzen 5 family, boasting six cores and 12 threads with a base clock frequency of 3.6GHz and a boost speed of upward to 4GHz. Like all Ryzen CPUs, the 1600X is unlocked, just we wouldn't necessarily expect to squeeze much more out of the stock settings given what we've seen from Ryzen 7.

AMD says the 1600X will be almost 70% faster than the Core i5-7600K when measuring multi-threaded performance in Cinebench, though that isn't a huge surprise considering the Ryzen part has ii more cores plus eight threads.

Alongside the 1600X is a second six-core part known as the 1600, which comes downclocked by 400MHz but is notwithstanding completely unlocked. Equally was the case when nosotros reviewed the 1700X and 1700, it's likely that the 1600 will be a much better buy than the 1600X. All the same, we only take the 1600X on hand for today'southward testing.

The 1500X and 1400 stand for AMD'south new four-core/8-thread Ryzen v parts and these come clocked even lower out of the box. The 1500X operates at a base clock of 3.5GHz with a boost of iii.7GHz and the 1400 runs at 3.2GHz merely tin boost to 3.4GHz (and again, both are unlocked).

For those wondering, the 1500X and 1600 volition ship with the Wraith Spire cooler while the 1400 comes with the smaller Wraith Stealth cooler. Unfortunately, we only accept one quad-core model on hand for review and that's the higher-clocked 1500X.

Price-wise, the 1600X is gear up at $250 alongside the Cadre i5-7600K, though we suspect you may be better off buying the standard 1600 for $30 less at $220. Folks seeking a sub-$200 Ryzen 5 chip have the 1500X and 1400 to option from at $190 and $170, prices that compete with lower-end (locked) Core i5s and college-end Cadre i3s such equally the $170 unlocked 7350K, which we know to exist terrible value.

By the way things await on newspaper, the Ryzen 5 1400 should have Intel's unabridged Kaby Lake-based Core i3 range begging for mercy while the locked Core i5 models should exist every bit if not more than rattled.

In the first of what volition likely be many write-ups about Ryzen 5, we'll exist pitting the 1500X against the locked Core i5-7500 and the 1600X confronting the unlocked 7600K. The Cadre i7-7700K, 6900K and 1800X will exist included purely for comparison'due south sake, and although nosotros haven't had time to add together results for the six-core 6800K, we call back information technology'southward unnecessary anyhow. Given Ryzen's pricing scheme, Broadwell-E tin exist considered a write-off at this bespeak.