CPU Retest 2017 – New Benchmarks, Updates and More!

Synthetic Benchmarks

3DMark Firestrike

This is a very interesting result, while Intel dominates the top of the chart, it’s the order of the Ryzen chips that surprised the most. Some of the Ryzen 5’s out performed the Ryzen 7’s. This is simply because they have fewer cores, but can operate them at a higher frequency, allowing for better outright performance in some tests. Of course, the 1800X would have more room for multitasking, but it shows just how competitive the R5 can be. What surprised me most is that while the i9 is in the lead, it’s nowhere near as high scoring as you might expect given the spec and price.

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Overclocked

Overclocking really closed the gap on the Intel CPUs, with the older 5960X still holding its own nicely. The 7740X is another big surprise here, as it was able to beat all the Ryzen chips thanks to it running cooler and more stable than the 7700K it is replacing. Again the Ryzen 5 1600X is beating out the 1800X in a straight up graphics test though. I think the Ryzen 3 are putting on a good show too, they’re the slowest, but not by as much as you would think for chips that cost little over £100.

Unigine Superposition 1080p Extreme

Unigine is a lot more GPU bound than FireStrike, which makes it a great way to test PCIe throughput from the CPU and check for bottlenecks. All of the chips performed about the same here. Yes, the Ryzen 5 is top, but the scores are all within an error of margin so there’s no real winner here, they all passed. Well, all but one, the older 5960X showed some slowdown here, but not much, most likely due to differences in the memory kit used.

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Overclocked

Overclocking did fix the issue for the 5960X, and any concerns about GPU throttling on anything from the Ryzen 3 up to the Core i9 are easily washed away here. Hilariously the Ryzen 3 actually came out on top, but again, you could retest these all days and all chips would change places; they all performed about the same in reality. However, it does look like quad-core is king for this test.

PCMark 10 Express

Synthetic benchmarks only tell us so much, and while we love gaming, we all use our PCs for work and other day-to-day tasks. PCMark 10 Express simulates a few hours usage of Skype, document editing, browsing and more. The two Intel chips dominated pretty hard here, they’re brute force approach to power is a big benefit to these tasks. Strange that the 7740X edged the lead, I would have expected the i9 to be way out in front here. As predicted, the 1800X is the multitasking AMD king, and the Ryzen R5 1600X is putting on a good show again too.

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Overclocked

Overclocking has made me even more confused, as the quad-core 7740X blasted into the lead. The 7900X saw a small performance gain, and the 5960X is still showing it has enough grunt to compete too. The Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 chips all performed very close to each other, falling almost in line with how they were priced. Again though, the Ryzen 3 aren’t that far behind given their budget price, I’m starting to like them more and more.

WPrime 32M and 1024M

This is where the Intel i9-7900X shows what it’s made of. When it comes to hardcore number crunching on your next workstation build, it leaves everything in its dust. This is a phenomenal time and if you’re running it on a workstation, it’ll cut your computation times down drastically. Of course, the 1800X is doing pretty fantastic too, and impressively so for around half the price of the i9. Time is money as they say, so it’s nice to see where everything sits in Wprime. The Ryzen 3 fell flat on their face here, but that was to be expected.

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Overclocked

Overclocking turned this around a lot too, as the 7900X only gained 1.2 seconds, as it was already boosting to close to the overclock and thermal throttling makes it hard to push it any harder than this test already does. The 1800X, on the other hand, cut its time by 7.1 seconds. The 7740K may be good in some tests, but AMD have the lead on them here in the same price range.

Cinebench R15

Another fine example of what the i9 was designed to do, it’s without a doubt a solid number cruncher for rendering tasks. Of course, you’ll pay up for the privilege, but if time is money, then this will save you a lot of time. The Ryzen 7’s are doing great too, keeping in mind they have fewer cores than the i9. With Threadripper on the way, we’re eager to see just where it sits with the i9. The 7740X is falling behind a few AMD chips now though, but it does only have four cores, so that’s to be expected.

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Overclocked

Overclcoking saw a tiny improvement for the i9, but nice gains for everything else. The R7’s all pretty much fell in line once we overclocked them.

Handbrake MP4 to MKV Conversion 4K

Again a fairly similar story here, with the i9 up front, the 5960X behind that, then working our way through the Ryzen chips. The quad-core 7740X didn’t fair too well here, with the cheaper Ryzen 3 1300X offering very similar performance.

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Overclocked

Overclocking gave the 7740K a big boost, moving it from near the bottom to the top of our list thanks to the 5GHz clock speed. The 7900X still dominates, as do all the Intel chips, with the Ryzen 7, 5, and 3 all falling in line in the right order.