AMD Ryzen 9 5900X

The underdog takes the lead

- ALAN DEXTER

LET’S CUT TO THE CHASE: The performance of the Ryzen 9 5900X and AMD’s latest Zen 3 architecture is good. It’s really good. It pretty much delivers on the promise that AMD laid out at the chip reveal on October 8, and if nothing else that should make for very worrying reading for Intel. For us gamers that is nothing but good news, because there is now real choice when it comes to the best CPU for gaming for our next build.

Intel has managed to stay competitive through AMD’s successive performance improvements to Zen thanks to its dominance in gaming. While AMD was making everything else to do with computing a miserable story for Intel, it still had that one flag to cling to. That has now gone. While Zen 3 doesn’t dominate Intel in gaming quite in the way that AMD optimistically hoped it might, there is now basically nothing between the two. The fact that this chip can do lots of other processor-intensive tasks and game just as well as Intel’s finest means that Intel isn’t really an option for anyone wanting serious performance.