SHOULD YOU UPGRADE YOUR OLD RYZEN TO A NEW RYZEN 5000?

GOT A RYZEN 1000, 2000, OR 3000 AND CONSIDERING AN UPGRADE? HERE’S WHAT WE THINK.

- GORDON MAH UNG

Intel users aren’t the only ones jealous of the gobsmacking performance of AMD’s new Ryzen 5000. Those on older versions of Ryzen are probably green with envy too.

Before you wade into the scrum of trying to buy one of AMD’s hot new Ryzen 5000 chips (see page 33), though, you should know whether it’s really worth upgrading or not. Generation-over-generation upgrades are rarely ever worth it, whether you’re talking CPUs or GPUs. To see if that applies here, we collected CPU performance figures from chips we’ve tested internally and supplemented them. This means they’re a little less precise, but because the test, Cinebench R15, is mostly a pure compute test, it’s precise enough for this purpose.

Cinebench is a 3D modelling test, which doesn’t mean it will map directly to, say, browsing, Office, or most light work. But it’s still an easy way to visualize just how much computing power is in a PC. A higher score in Cinebench generally tracks with overall performance increases.

First we’ll look at single-threaded performance across the four generations of Ryzen CPUs. Rather than multi-core, which might give you a better performance in 3D modelling, video editing, and other CPU-intensive workstation apps, single-threaded performance tends to dictate responsiveness of most Office (but not all) tasks, browsing, and most (but not all) photo-editing tasks, along with other lighter-duty work.

In the charts that follow, we’ve color-coded the four different Ryzen series for easier reading.

(If you’re wondering what happened to the 4000-series of desktop chips, read this [go.pcworld.com/yry5].)