Tech Scribble

  Thermals and Power AMD delivered its most energy efficient architecture to date with Zen 3. Consider the fact that Ryzen 5 5600X delivers ~15% faster performance than Ryzen 5 3600X in general while delivering north of 20% faster performance in many gaming titles, all while sipping much less power with rated TDP of 65W vs 95W.  Taking a look at the power consumption figures, we can easily see just how far AMD came in terms of power efficiency. Smaller node does allow for more densely packed transistors while also improving energy efficiency. Compared to the 45nm node for Phenom, the Ryzen 5000 series is on a significantly newer enhanced 7nm node with further improvements to the architecture to get a 24% generational improvement in energy efficiency. For the following benchmarks, sensor data was collected as reported by readings from HWInfo. Software readings as such doesn't always portray the actual temperatures, specially on older processors such as Phenom. They are better s...

Platform Benchmarks The Ryzen series of processors (1000 to 5000) being on a newer socket AM4, necessitated a complete platform upgrade i.e. both the motherboard and memory. With the upgraded platform came newer features(for me at least, stuck in 2010). Features such as DDR4 memory(vs DDR3), PCIe 3.0(vs PCIe 1.1; yeah THAT old), SATA III (vs SATA II), USB 3.1 Gen2 (vs USB 2.0), Gigabit Ethernet( vs 100BASE-T or 100 Mbps ethernet), UEFI BIOS. In this section, we will be taking a look at memory and storage benchmarks. A before and after, if you will. Before we jump into the memory tests some definitions first, if you are not in the know. As you might know, RAM is primarily of two types- static and dynamic or SRAM and DRAM. We shall be  predominantly  talking about DRAM here.  The memory in previous system was dual-rank while this system is single rank, since only a single memory module is present. Now, a single RAM module doesn't necessarily mean its always single rank. You...

Hexa-cores vs dual-core In this short section, we will be throwing AMD Phenom II X2 550 (not the black edition) also into the fold. This was the first processor I ever used in my PC. Bought at ₹4500(~$60) back in 2010, this was my daily driver for 8 long years (dual core in 2018, feel free to roll your eyes), before I upgraded to 2nd-hand Phenom II 1055T at ₹3200(~$43). Why upgrade to a processor from the same 2010 generation? Well, upgrading to current gen wasn't an option until now since I would have to replace the motherboard, RAM, along with the processor. Even that upgrade in itself brought significant performance uplift. Dual-core processor (that too 4 generations old considering Ryzen 2000 series was out then) just didn't cut it anymore. In came 5600X which I upgraded to in May, 2021. Global chip shortage was at an all time high(still is) and with AMD launching the Ryzen 5000 series closely followed by its Radeon GPUs and the consoles by Microsoft and Sony (which has AMD...

 Gaming Benchmarks The arrival of Ryzen 5000 series finally dethroned Intel from the 'best gaming processor in the world' title. The IPC gains coupled with other improvements like reworked cache, improved boosting algorithm finally let AMD take the absolute performance crown. As can be comprehended from professional reviews, Ryzen 5 5600X demolishes every single processor Intel could offer in gaming at launch. Games do love high clock speeds owing to it being lightly threaded, in most of the games even now(DirectX 12 titles are better at utilizing threads though). As a result, games really reap benefits from overclocking. AMD had multi-threaded performance down cold but where it lagged behind was gaming. With each launch, AMD chipped away at Intel's lead. Ryzen 3000 series was almost neck-on-neck with its Intel counterparts, until the Intel processors were overclocked that is. Contrary to that, 5600X outpaces the flagship i9 10900K overclocked to 5.1 GHz even at 1080p mind ...

  CPU Benchmarks Before we get into the benchmarks, here is a specification comparison of the 3 processors (the dual core Phenom II X2 550 will be compared in a separate section). Starting off with the popular Cinebench benchmarks, Ryzen 5 5600X gets off to a flying start (more than flying start I should say) with a 319% lead over Phenom II X6 1055T in Cinebench R15. This goes on to show how misleading CPU comparison by core count can be.   Though both the processors are hexa-core parts, the performance disparity of over 4 times tells a different story which cannot be discerned by core count alone. Even with Simultaneous Multi-threading (SMT) disabled, I recon 5600X will still score more than double that of 1055T.  Moving on to Cinebench R20, we see more of the same. Single-core score of 5600X is much closer to the multi-core score of 1055T than its single-core score. That statement alone summarizes the graph quite nicely. 5600X was 223% faster than 1055T in single-c...

Test Setup and Methodology The entire benchmark suite for both the platforms was done on Windows 10 21H1 19043.964. Unfortunately this being my only PC, testing couldn't be done on a fresh installation of Windows 10. Graphics tests were performed with GPU driver version Radeon Adrenalin Edition 21.3.2. For tests with AMD Phenom II X6 1055T, the CPU was undervolted to Vcore 1.3V (-0.125V) to keep the temperature in check. This didn't affect performance to any measurable degree according to my testing. Also, this was the setting the system used to run regularly back then. CPU-Z benchmark showed 0-3% better performance in favor of undervolted setting (was only able to perform CPU-Z benchmark before the system shut down due to overheating). With the default Vcore, idle temperature hovered around 65-70C for lack of a better cooler. Undervolted setting gave much better thermals as we will explore later. The PC case has a single Intake fan and 2 exhaust fans. Testing was done with si...