AMD Ryzen R5 1500X Quad-Core AM4 Processor Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

The Ryzen R5 1500X is kind to the wallet at just £150/$179, which is less than half the price of the Ryzen R7 1700 which is £294.98. It may be half the price, give or a take, but it’s certainly not half the performance when it comes to gaming or rendering tasks.

Overview

I’ve been having a lot of fun with the Ryzen hardware, it’s come as quite a surprise in terms of how competitive it can be and how it may yet drive the overall market prices down for high-end CPUs. Intel has been pretty much playing by themselves and the market has gotten pretty boring, to say the least. The latest from AMD may not be topping a lot of our charts in our benchmarks, but it was never designed to do so. The R5 1500X is a fairly humble quad-core eight-thread processor, but what stands out the most is just how freaking cheap it is. The cheapest Intel quad-core is still around £190, and the R5 beats out the i7-7700K in 3D Mark, Shadow of Mordor, AIDA 64, WPrime, although Intel does pull ahead in a few others. It’s knock for knock, but at half the price it’s a bargain that’s pretty hard to ignore.

If you’re planning on a cost-effective gaming system and need a quad-core CPU to get good game performance, the R5 range is showing a lot of promise. If you’re doing a lot of stuff in rendering, such as Handbrake, then the R7 range is clearly the way to go, but for the majority of consumers, the R5 is enough. Is the Intel i7-7700K better overall for some gamers, yes, but is it good enough to justify spending twice the price? I don’t think so. If you’re gaming at 1920 x 1080 and refresh rates above 60Hz, this is a good opportunity to save yourself some cash.

There are still a lot of gains to be found with Ryzen, the architecture is still pretty fresh, BIOS updates are coming thick and fast, each bringing better performance, more stable overclocking, and features as they’re released, and we’ve certainly not seen the end of that. Windows performance is improving with a few updates too, as are many games like Ashes of the Singularity, Total War, and many others to support the new architecture.

I’ve got the Ryzen 1600X 6-core 12-thread CPU sitting on my test bench now, and I’m eager to see where that sits from the cost effective R5 1500X and the more expensive R7 series. Check out the review here!

Pros

• Exceptional value for money
• Quad-core performance at dual-core prices
• Latest AM4 platform
• Easy to overclock to 4GHz
• Able to compete with more expensive processors from Intel
• Ideal for 1080P gaming systems
• Low TDP and temperatures

Cons

• Falls behind in rendering tasks

Neutral

• Higher memory latency than Intel, but it doesn’t have a big impact on real-world performance

“The R5 1500X is offering reliable performance for mid-range gaming system builds at bargain prices. Like the legendary chips of AMDs history, it’s easy to overclock this cheaper chip to match the performance of more expensive Intel offerings.”