Review: Ryzen 5 5500 and 5600 can breathe new life into older AMD PCs:
AMD's Ryzen 5 5500 and 5600 CPUs (which go on sale today for $159 and $199, respectively) are both six-core 12-thread processors aimed squarely at mid-range, price-conscious PCs used for gaming and photo and video editing. The new Ryzens significantly undercut the original $299 asking price of the Ryzen 5 5600X (the 5600X was, for many months, the cheapest way to get Zen 3). And the CPUs finally provide a replacement for the last-gen $199 Ryzen 5 3600.
But the new chips have stiff competition in Intel's Core i5-12400 processor ($210-ish with an integrated GPU, $180-ish without one). Intel's desktop CPUs were saddled with the aging Skylake architecture and/or the aging 14nm manufacturing process for years, but a modern architecture and the Intel 7 process make the 12400 Intel's most appealing mid-range CPU option in a long time. The Ryzen 5 5600X has also seen price cuts recently, falling down to around $230 to make more room for the $300 eight-core Ryzen 7 5700X.
[...] AMD's power efficiency compares well to older 10th- and 11th-generation Intel chips. The Ryzen PCs draw a bit more power at the wall, but they also take less time to complete the work. But the Core i5-12400 manages to catch up and then some, thanks to the Intel 7 process. AMD may well regain its power-efficiency edge with Ryzen 7000 CPUs on TSMC's 5nm process, but for now, Intel has a small advantage (at least when you're not running a Core i7 or i9 CPU with its power limits turned up).
(Score: 2) by looorg on Tuesday April 05 2022, @09:51AM (1 child)
Getting new hardware significantly increases "life" (usability, performance or whatever you like to call it) of your old machine? Is this news from the No-shit-Sherlock-department?
(Score: 2) by driverless on Tuesday April 05 2022, @11:11AM
I think this story came from the AMD advertorial department.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 05 2022, @01:58PM (2 children)
here they're only selling the new alderlake i3 as a package (cpu, mainboard ,ram, case, psu etc etc)
hat off to AMD for the AM4 socket.
would be f..king crazy if intel and amd could agree on a socket lol...for the next 10 years. maybe the good friends at b-euro-crazy(tm) can help?
(Score: 4, Funny) by epitaxial on Tuesday April 05 2022, @02:04PM (1 child)
At least the AM4 has stuck around a good while. Intel changes cpu sockets damn near quarterly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 05 2022, @11:12PM
AM4 prolly has the guiness world record of a cpu socket that can accept the most amount of "different" cpus ...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 05 2022, @05:09PM (7 children)
Zen3, launched in 2020, isn't that old. With a headline espousing a breath of new life for older AMD PCs, I was expecting news of a processor I might use to upgrade my FX-8350. I am disappoint.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday April 05 2022, @05:20PM (4 children)
AMD recently officially announced support for older chipsets:
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=22/03/16/0759228 [soylentnews.org]
So there is potentially a path for someone with a Ryzen 5 2600 or Ryzen 5 3600 to upgrade to the Ryzen 5 5600. All of these launched at a $199 MSRP.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 05 2022, @05:53PM (3 children)
So, AMD enables motherboard manufacturers to update their BIOS so that people won't need to buy a new motherboard. And motherboard manufacturers are actually expected to get onboard with this? Baffling.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Tuesday April 05 2022, @06:30PM (2 children)
Yeah, it's annoying. But some of the motherboard manufacturers had unofficial support even before AMD changed its tune.
Hopefully some better decisions are made with the upcoming AM5 socket, which will be a clean slate.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 05 2022, @11:29PM (1 child)
being able to flashing the bios from a special usb port on the mainboard without a cpu installed is prolly the best invention of this century :D
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday April 05 2022, @11:59PM
I did it a few months ago and it worked like a charm.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 07 2022, @07:04AM (1 child)
The 300 series goes back to 2016. That's still pretty old, and includes all consumer desktop Zen CPUs.
The AM4 socket is physically and electrically compatible with every AM4 CPU. The support is a matter of BIOS software. Of course no one is making upgrades for decade old Bulldozer CPUs.
The thing is that AMD promised to support socket AM4 until at least 2020 and explicitly marketed it with the idea that you could put a new CPU in your motherboard when you wanted to upgrade. Then when those CPUs came out they told everyone they had to buy new motherboards after all. "We're still supporting the socket", said AMD, "just in a way that makes you still have to buy a new motherboard."
But now that the platform is outdated, support for the older motherboards appears. Zen 3 is outperformed both in raw numbers and value by Intel now and the next AMD CPU will have a new socket. In other words there's kind of no reason to buy a new AMD CPU right now. Unless you can put it in your existing motherboard, of course.
AMD is just doing the most profitable thing every step of the way. There is nothing customer friendly about it and their ethical standards are still lacking.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday April 07 2022, @08:37AM
The AMD motherboards tend to be cheaper, and they have been around for longer than LGA 1700. So it's possible for a completely new build with a Ryzen 5 5600 to be a better value than the Intel Core i5-12400 since they are close in performance. Other matchups are not as kind to AMD. The Gamers Nexus review of the Ryzen 5 5500 was pretty scathing, and the Ryzen 5 4500 and Ryzen 3 4100 in particular are not going to compete at all with the Core i3-12100F. Some of these AMD prices need to drop by $50, if not more.
The i5-12400 getting beaten by the 5600X in many cases [tomshardware.com] shows that Intel's best trick is still to use lots of power. So it suffers when the TDP (yes, it's a pseudo-technical marketing term) is scaled back to 65W, and Alder Lake mobile can lose to Rembrandt at lower TDPs (e.g. 15-35 Watts).
The DDR4/DDR5 situation is also interesting but I'll leave it there for now.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]