AMD has not yet launched its upcoming
Ryzen 5 2500X and Ryzen 3 2300X, which will flesh out the company's second-generation Ryzen family. However, both chips have been spotted and detailed in numerous leaks and
benchmarking runs. It's happened once again, with a Chinese-language website getting its hands on a pair of engineering samples and seeing how far things can go when cooling with liquid nitrogen.
We will get to the overclocking details in a moment, but first let's go over the stock specs. Assuming these engineering samples are indicative of finalized silicon, here's how they stack up against AMD's other second-generation Ryzen CPUs:
- Ryzen 7 2700X: 8 cores / 16 threads, 3.7GHz to 4.3GHz, 20MB total cache, 105W TDP
- Ryzen 7 2700: 8 cores / 16 threads, 3.2GHz to 4.1GHz, 20MB total cache, 65W TDP
- Ryzen 5 2600X: 6 cores / 12 threads, 3.6GHz to 4.2GHz, 19MB total cache, 95W TDP
- Ryzen 5 2600: 6 cores / 12 threads, 3.4GHz to 3.9GHz, 19MB total cache, 65W TDP
- Ryzen 5 2500X: 4 cores / 8 threads, 3.6GHz to 4GHz, 18MB total cache, 65W TDP
- Ryzen 3 2300X: 4 cores / 4 threads, 3.5GHz to 4GHz, 10MB total cache, 65W TDP
It's possible that AMD could tweak the specs before releasing the Ryzen 5 2500X and Ryzen 3 2300X to the public, but the above specs have stayed pretty consistent from leak to leak.
Okay, let's get to the fun stuff. The folks at XFastest got its mitts on both of the unreleased chips and proceeded to overclock them. For the Ryzen 5 2500X, they 'only' used a 240mm water cooling setup, which allowed them to squeeze an additional 300MHz out of the boost clock, resulting in a 4.3GHz ceiling. After doing so, they ran it through Cinebench R15, scoring 1,006 in the multi-threaded portion of the test.
It was the Ryzen 3 2300X that got the LN2 treatment, however, resulting in a much higher overclock. During the first attempt, they pushed it past 5.6GHz (5,663MHz), though it wasn't stable in Cinebench R15. They backed things down to just below 5.6GHz (5,585MHz) and were able to complete a Cinebench R15 run, scoring 895 points.
That's a lower score that the water cooled Ryzen 5 2500X, but keep in mind the higher-end chip has the benefit of throwing 8 threads at workloads. As to how these scores compare with existing CPUs, reference the above graph, which we plucked from our
Ryzen 7 2700X and Ryzen 5 2600X review.
So what does this tell us? Well, not much that we didn't already know. The scores are in line with what we would expect, given the specs and architecture. Still, it's interesting to see enthusiasts go nuts with LN2, even though it's not a practical cooling solution.
The biggest takeaway is that AMD is likely to launch these new chips soon, hence why they keep appearing in leaks.