https://www.vortez.net/articles_pages/amd_ryzen_5_1400_1600_review,1.html Despite their higher costs, die hard PC gamers tend to stick with Intel and Nvidia for the most part, due to their being much better plug-n-play solutions that require fewer updates and tweaking and tend to have better drivers and whatnot in general and because they usually provide the highest performance. However, the new ryzen chips are providing the first real challenge to Intel's offerings in the last five years making them of particular interest to those looking for more performance on a budget, which is why I chose this particular article which has benchmarks for what is arguable the best value chip in the just released r5 series, the 1600. While this chip costs roughly $220.oo, the nearest equivalent Intel chip costs $350.oo and to buy one with both similar performance and the same number of cores would cost at least $150.oo more making it the best budget chip offering in well over five years. You have to overclock it to get that kind of performance but, these days, that's just a click of the mouse and the chip comes with its own quite respectable air cooling solution designed just for overclocking if you don't already have water cooling. The video game developers appear to be jumping on the bandwagon as fast as they can tweaking their games to run better on the new processors to bring them significantly closer to the performance of Intel's offerings but, for those who want to have their cake and eat it too, it might be best to wait until the end of the year after everyone has had a chance to tweak their games and software and make the chips more plug-n-play friendly and, of course, for the prices to come down even more as competition heats up. In the meantime, this article gives some idea of what kind of multicore processing this budget chip is capable of including ray tracing and VR benchmarks that indicate it is more future-proof than buying a quad core Intel cpu and will allow people to do things like play video games while they download stuff online or whatever in the background. Most video games only require a dual core processor, with some of them even running on just one core, but many are capable of using quad core processors and as hex core and octo core chips like these bring the prices down rapidly over the next year we should see more than the current handful of games and other programs that can take advantage of even more cores. Theoretically, something like 93 cpu cores are about as many as any home computer or small business could possibly ever use and eight are a good minimum simply because they can process complete matrices making them automatically 25% more efficient at countless tasks. A hex core chip like this one is a compromise between greater efficiency and what people are willing to pay for and these benchmarks indicate its a pretty damned good compromise for most home uses such as transcoding videos from one format to another, photoshop work, etc., as well as, for video gaming, VR, ray tracing, and whatever.
