I had built a system with a Ryzen 5 3600 a few months back, and even though it’s powerful with 6 cores and 12 threads I wanted to upgrade to the newer AMD 5000 series of processors. I finally decided to upgrade to a Ryzen 7 5800x. How much of a performance gain do we get, let’s find out.
Getting a hold of AMD’s 5000 series processors is quite infuriating, with low availability all over the world. These processors also have exorbitant prices due to this.
Finally getting my hands on the Ryzen 7 5800x I couldn’t wait to put my system together.
The ryzen 7 5800x is an 8 core 16 thread beast of a processor, which at present beats all of Intel’s flagship processors, which is surprising as the 5800x is not the top of the line processor from AMD.
MRP is marked as 62k, but the processor is now available around 39k.
This is the processor, which is visible through this small plastic window on the side, not sure why they keep it open like this, is it for users to make sure they’re actually receiving the processor they’ve paid for?
Here’s a 1.5 gram syringe of Kingpin cooling thermal paste bundled together with the processor, I’m not going to use this as my AIO already has thermal paste pre-applied.
Let’s open up the box and you will notice the empty space where a CPU cooler is meant to be. AMD has stopped bundling CPU coolers with their higher end processors. Being an enthusiast class PC builder, you would use a premium cooler with a processor like this one. Only the Ryzen 5 5600x includes a Wraith Stealth cooler in the box.
We have some paperwork from AMD and an important note, that we need a Socket AM4 compatible motherboard to use this processor.
My motherboard does support the 5800x but needs a BIOS update before it can be installed.
Here’s the processor, looks just like the 3600 I purchased earlier, but this does bring in more processing muscle in the same form-factor.
AMD processors use the Pin Grid Array chip design, which have actual pins on the bottom. We have to be careful so as to not bend the pins or god forbid break any, as that would make it a very expensive paper weight.
It’s got some weight to it.
The motherboard I’m using is the same I used for the Ryzen 5 3600, the B550M Pro-VDH Wi-Fi.
It supports the 5000 series processors, which only needs the BIOS to be updated to the latest version.
I like this motherboard as it allows us to update the bios using this button on the back without needing a processor, gpu or RAM.
You only need the latest bios to be on an external USB-drive and power the motherboard on while holding down this button.
But as I have an existing 3000 series processor, I would just download the latest BIOS off the manufacturer’s website. I would be downloading the last stable release and not the BETA version.
Extract the files and copy it onto an external flash drive.
So plug it into your system.
Extract the files into a folder and make sure it is meant for your motherboard. The bios will not flash anyway if the models don’t match.
Copy the extracted files over and then reboot the system into the BIOS.
MSI has their M-flash utility, each motherboard has their own name for the option.
The system reboots into the BIOS flashing mode,
The USB drive is found and we can select the bios file from the list on the right.
The current BIOS version is displayed below, click on Yes to start the flashing process.
Make sure the system is connected to a power backup, as, if you lose power midway you could brick the system, in other words the motherboard would stop working.
Once the system starts to reboot, enter the BIOS again and we can see the updated BIOS information. So, the flashing was a success and we can proceed to install the 5800X
Let’s begin the CPU transplant.
Currently I’m using a 120mm AIO or liquid cooler which could work but as the 5800x is a higher TDP processor which is 105 Watts as compared to only 65 watts on the 3600, I might need more powerful cooling.
I will be replacing the existing AIO with one that has two fans and a 240mm radiator.
Let’s begin the AIO teardown, we first remove the fan,
next the radiator
and finally, the AIO pump.
Here’s my 3600, a little cleaning of the thermal paste still present on it is necessary.
Now for the reverse process, we place the 5800x into the CPU socket matching the triangle mark with the one on the socket.
Clamp the lever down and the processor is installed.
Now to install the AIO, the review of the AIO will be in a separate video and I will link a card to it once it’s ready.
This cylindrical tower is the pump which would move the liquid within the radiator and back transferring the heat away from the CPU.
It comes with thermal paste pre applied, just install the AMD mounting brackets, remove the plastic protective cover and install over the CPU and screw it down.
The cooler supports A-RGB so it has cool RGB effects.
The first boot is the most nerve-racking, fingers crossed, and the POST or Power On Self-Test completed successfully.
It has found the new processor and we need to enter the BIOS to configure it.
Here we are, Ryzen 7 5800X. Can’t wait to see how much of performance we gain by upgrading.
So for that I have run a couple of benchmarks so here are the results.
Current config is,
CPU is now the Ryzen 7 5800x
GPU is a RTX 2070 Super
64 Gb of Corsair Vengeance 3600 MHz RAM
Pure processing tasks do improve over the 3600, with gains in both single and multicore scores.
The Ryzen 5 3600 has a single core score of 1204 points and a multi core score of 8571
The Ryzen 7 5800X has a single core score of 1577 points but the multi core score is way
above at 14044 points
3D mark the de facto gaming benchmark software, in the timespy benchmark on the Ryzen 5 3600 we have a score of 9477, and the Ryzen 7 5800x has a score of 10,019. Not much of a jump, the processor does help with the score, but the benchmark is more GPU bound.
Port Royale a ray tracing benchmark 6006 on the Ryzen 5 3600 and 6011 on the Ryzen 7 5800x. Not much of a difference there as the GPU is the same.
Shadow of the Tomb raider, a game with a benchmarking mode in-game, running in 4K we see an average of 63 fps on the Ryzen 5 3600 and not surprisingly the exact same average frame rate on the 5800x too.
Adobe premiere is much faster and smoother, with the ability to scrub through 4k video without a hitch.
Rendering was also quite fast, almost halving the time required.
Let’s look at the power draw on the 5800x.
At idle the 5800x is pulling around 117 watts and when running a benchmark, it spikes to around 265 watts. This was while running Cinebench R23 which is CPU intensive only.
When running 3dmark the power draw was around 320-335 watts on the Ryzen 7 5800x.
Blender BMW render test the Ryzen 7 5800X blazed through it at 2 minutes 41 seconds and the Ryzen 5 3600 completed the test in 6 minutes 21 seconds. Do note lower time is better.
The 5800x is a beast of a processor, the prices were outrageously high earlier and are now starting to fall to their original MSRP. Gaming performance is more dependent on the GPU than the CPU, but a CPU which can process data fast enough to feed a powerful GPU is also necessary. If you are looking for a good gaming processor this might be overkill, but for content creation such as video editing, image manipulation the 5800x would be able to flex it’s 8 core 16 thread muscle.
