AMD Ryzen 7 5800X review

Two minute review

The AMD Ryzen 7 5800X may have just helped AMD shoot past Intel in the processor race. More than anything, this CPU symbolizes AMD's complete domination of the mainstream desktop processor market, even more than the Ryzen 9 5900X.

Intel has held the reins in the gaming processor market by always prioritizing the high clock speeds that PC games crave. To compete, AMD completely redesigned its Zen 3 architecture. So, while it’s still based on the same 7nm manufacturing process as its predecessor, AMD changed the Core Die (CCD) design to only allow for one Core Complex per die. 

To make up for this impactful change, each CCX now has 8 cores – that’s up from 4 cores per CCX on Zen 2, greatly reducing latency between cores, and each core has direct access to 32MB of L3 cache, helping improve gaming performance. It’s these improvements in speed and efficiency that give the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X the most meaningful upgrade to gaming CPU performance we've seen in years. 

Alongside a much stronger single-core performance, Team Red also packed it with 8 cores and 16 threads. With solid specs like these, the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X will likely show up in a huge number of gaming PCs over the next year or so. 

However, this redesign comes with a higher price tag. The AMD Ryzen 7 5800X is $449 (about £340, AU$620), up from the $399 (£349, AU$645) of the Ryzen 7 3800X. That's the same price increase experienced across the board gen-on-gen with Ryzen 5000, it's just disappointing that pricing saw an increase at all. However it's not hard to see why AMD did this, as Intel doesn't really have anything that can even compete right now. The closest competitor, the Intel Core i7-10700K is $399 (£379, AU$609), and while we haven't tested that specific processor, we're confident the Ryzen 7 5800X handily beats it across the board.

At least you won't have to buy a new motherboard. AMD isn't even releasing a new chipset this time around, which means if you already have an X570 Motherboard you already have you already have a compatible board – you just need to update the BIOS.

For that money, you're getting an 8 core, 16 thread processor, that can boost up to 4.7GHz, with a total of 32MB of L3 Cache. That's very similar to the specs of the Ryzen 7 3800X, which has the same amount of cores and cache, but only boosts up to 4.5GHz. That 200MHz difference doesn't seem like a lot, but it's important to note that through the new improvements, especially giving each core direct access to all the cache, IPC (instructions per clock) performance has increased by up to 39% in games, according to AMD.

However, while performance gets a massive bump, AMD has decided to leave the included Wraith cooler out of the package this time around. This means you're going to have to add the price of an aftermarket cooler to your purchase. This is ultimately a net positive, however, as the processor can get up to 87°C, even with a 360mm AIO cooler.

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While frequency itself only gets a minor bump up, single-core performance is massively improved across our entire testing suite. And, of course, because single-core performance is better, multi-core performance is also massively improved.

Cinebench R20 is a flawed test, but it is useful to show the raw differential between processors, and in that test the Ryzen 7 5800X was around 18% faster in single-core performance and 12% faster in multi-core than the Ryzen 7 3800XT. More impressive, however is that it was 19% faster than the Intel Core i9-9900K in single core and 20% faster in multi-core. And that's a processor with both a higher boost clock and the same amount of cores and threads.

Where AMD is really trying to push this processor, however, is in games. And, here, the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X beats out even the Intel Core i9-10900K.

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Even in Total War: Three Kingdoms, a processor that's optimized for Intel hardware, the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X beats out the 10900K by 7%. That's a single-digit increase but it's still a significant fps increase for a simple processor change.

Because it's more affordable than the Ryzen 9 5900X while delivering basically the same level of gaming performance at 1080p, this is easily the best gaming processor for a vast majority of people.

The fact that it delivers virtually the same single-core performance, while still offering more than enough cores and threads for creative workloads, means that gamers will get the same performance, and anyone that wants to branch into creative work will still have enough horsepower to get it done efficiently.

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