AMD Ryzen 9 5950X And 5900X CPU Review: Zen 3 Dominates


AMD Ryzen 9 5950X And 5900X Review: System Level Benchmarks

Test System Configuration Notes: When configuring our test systems for this article, we first made sure all firmwares were up to date, then we entered each system's respective BIOS / UEFI and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High performance" defaults. We then saved the settings, re-entered the BIOS and set the memory frequency to the maximum officially supported speed for the given platform (without overclocking). The SSDs were then formatted, and the latest build of Windows 10 Pro x64 was installed and fully updated.

amd ryzen 5000 package

When the Windows installation was complete, we installed all of the drivers necessary for our components, disabled Auto-Updating and Windows Defender, and installed all of our benchmarking software. When that process was done, we performed a disk clean-up, cleared any temp and prefetch data, and optimized all of the SSDs using Windows' built-in utility. Finally, we enabled Windows Focus Assist to minimize any potential interruptions and let the systems reach an idle state before invoking a test.

HotHardware's Test Systems
Intel and AMD - Head To Head
system specs
Preliminary Testing with SiSoft SANDRA 2020
Synthetic Benchmarks

We began our testing with the latest version of SiSoftware's SANDRA 2020, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran four of the built-in sub-system tests that partially comprise the suite with the Core i9-9900KS (CPU Arithmetic, Multimedia, Cache and Memory, and Memory Bandwidth). All of the scores reported below were taken with the CPU running at its default settings, with 16GB of DDR4 RAM running at 3,200MHz, in dual-channel mode, on the MSI MEG X570 Godlike motherboard.

san cpu 5900x san mm 5900x
 AMD Ryzen 9 5900X
Processor Arithmetic
AMD Ryzen 9 5900X
Multi-Media

san mem 5900x san cache 5900x
 AMD Ryzen 9 5900X
Memory Bandwidth
AMD Ryzen 9 5900X
Cache And Memory

san cpu 5950x san mm 5950x
 AMD Ryzen 9 5950X
Processor Arithmetic
AMD Ryzen 9 5950X
Multi-Media

san mem 5950x san cache 5950x
 AMD Ryzen 9 5950X
Memory Bandwidth
AMD Ryzen 9 5950X
Cache And Memory

Right out of the gate, the Ryzen 9 5900X and 5950X put up some strong numbers. The SiSoft SANDRA CPU Arithmetic test shows the 12-core 5900X offering up over 419GOPS, with the 16-core 5950X coming in at the 527GOPS mark. The Multi-Media benchmark shows similarly strong scores with the 5900X and 5950X putting up aggregate native numbers of 1.68GPix/s and 2Gpix/s, respectively. Both systems offered up memory bandwidth in the 32-35GB/s range, using a 3200MHz memory speed, though time to copy was about 7% faster on the 5900X. The Cache and Memory Latency test show both CPUs with memory latency scores of about 65ns.

Geekbench
Synthetic CPU Testing

In the GeekBench tests, we're stressing only the CPU cores in a system (not the graphics card or GPU), with both single and multi-threaded workloads. The tests are comprised of encryption processing, image compression, HTML5 parsing, physics calculations and other general purpose compute processing workloads.

geekbench amd ryzen 5000

The Ryzen 9 5900X and 5950X rocked the GeekBench CPU benchmark. In this test, AMD's new flagship processors for its mainstream socket AM4 platform offer up the strongest single-thread performance by far, with excellent multithread performance as well. AMD Ryzen 5000 multithread scaling is so good, the 12-core Ryzen 9 5900X nearly catches the 18-core Core i9-10980XE, while the 16-core 5950X actually surpasses it.

PCMark 10
System Level Benchmark

Next up we have some full-system testing with PCMark. We're reporting all test results from the PCMark 10 benchmark suite, including the Essentials, Productivity, Digital Content Creation and and total PCMark score. The Essentials test covers workloads like web browsing, video conferencing and app start-up times, while Productivity tests everyday office apps from spreadsheets to word processing. Finally, the Digital Content Creation test evaluates performance of a machine with respect to photo and video editing, as well as rendering and visualization.
pcmark10 amd ryzen 5000

All of the platforms tested here offer more than enough oomph for PCMark 10's workloads. Regardless, the Ryzen 9 5900X and 5950X still put up impressive numbers, finishing at the top of the stack, ahead of all of the other platforms we tested.

Y-Cruncher
MT Pi Calculator

Y-Cruncher is a multi-core-capable tool that calculates the value of pi to a specified number of digits. In this case, we ran the tool on all threads and had the application calculate the value of pi to 1 billion digits. The values below are the time required to perform the calculation expressed in seconds. As a result, lower values indicate better performance.

y cruncher amd ryzen 5000

The High-End Desktop (HEDT) Threadripper and Extreme Edition Intel Core platforms offer significantly more memory bandwidth and end up in front here, but the Ryzen 9 5900X and 5950X managed to outpace all of the mainstream platforms yet again. The margins separating the top-end parts were relatively small, though.

STARS Euler3d
Computational Fluid Dynamics

STARS Euler3d is a computational fluid dynamics benchmark which uses a CFD grid that contains 1.23 million tetrahedral elements and 223 thousand nodes. The benchmark executable advances a mach 0.50 Advisory Group for Aerospace Research, or AGARD, flow solution for an aeroelastic test wing. The benchmark score is reported as a CFD cycle frequency in Hertz.

This benchmark is multi-threaded, but is also dependent on platform bandwidth, and cache and memory latency, so the final results are not determined by compute performance alone. Cache sizes and memory bandwidth affect the score as well...

euler amd ryzen 5000

This particular benchmark favors Intel's monolithic design and the Core i9-10980XE's quad-channel memory gives it a boost as well. A such, Intel's current flagship HEDT processor comes out on top, but the Ryzen 9 5900X and 5950X fall in just behind it, sandwiching the 3rd Gen Threadripper and outgunning all of the other mainstream processors.

Speedometer 2.0
Web App Performance Testing

Next up, we have some numbers from the Speedometer 2.0 test available at browserbench.org. The Speedometer Benchmark Suite uses a wide array of latency and throughput benchmarks to evaluate web application performance, and all of the results are tabulated into a final score. The benchmark measures performance of an array of browser-based technologies used on modern, rich web applications. Scores in this benchmark are an indicator of the performance users would see when browsing and running advanced web apps.

All of the systems were tested using the latest version of Microsoft's Edge browser, with default browser settings, on a clean install of Windows 10 Professional x64.

speedometer amd ryzen 5000

Speedometer seems to really like the larger cache, lower latencies, and relatively high clock speeds of AMD's Ryzen 9 5900X and 5950X. As you can see, both processors smoked the rest of the pack and finished at the top of the charts.

Related content