AMD Ryzen 5 3500X reviewed: better than Intel’s Core i5-9400F?

The recently launched 6 core & 6 threaded CPU – Ryzen 5 3500X is a Zen 2 based processor based on TSMC’s 7nm lithography. This seems to be an interesting CPU that could really give a tough competition in the budget CPU range.

Unfortunately, this CPU along with AMD’s 12 core Ryzen 9 3900 will be OEM exclusive only and the Ryzen 5 3500X will only be available to Chinese OEM companies. A Chinese site Expreview posted its review of the Ryzen 5 3500X and it contains enough details to get us the performance results.

We already know the enhanced performance of the Ryzen 3000 CPUs and like its brothers, the Ryzen 5 3500X is an excellent budget option. Both the single-core and multi-core performance of this CPU seems impressive and is a great one for gaming but sadly we can never use it on our custom PC build.

In the review posted by the Chinese site has compared the new CPU against the Intel Core i5 9400F priced at $150 which is truly a great gaming CPU for a budget segment. It will be interesting to see how Intel’s gaming CPU ends up against the new Ryzen 5 3500X.

The test setup used for the Ryzen CPU includes MSI’s B450M Mortar Titanium motherboard and G.Skill’s FlareX 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4-3200 memory kit with CL14-14-14-34 timings. The Intel system utilizes the B360M Mortar Titanium and an undisclosed DDR4-2666 memory kit. The XFX RX 5700 XT Black Wolf graphics card is used for both the systems.

So here are the performance overview:

According to the PCMark 10 scores, the Ryzen 5 3500X delivers up to 4.3% higher performance than the Intel Core i5-9400F. Though the new CPU lacks SMT or Simultaneous Multithreading, still it only lacks behind the Ryzen 5 3600 by 5.3%.

Coming to the other encoding and compression based performance tests, the new Ryzen 5 3500X is generally faster than the Intel’s counterpart. In tests like WinRAR or 7-Zip, the Ryzen performs 34% and 24.1% better than Intel one while in other tests there’s a minor difference of 2% to 11%.

So from performance benchmarks, we can conclude that the Ryzen 5 3500X is much more productive than the Intel Core i5-9400F in both single-core and multi-core aspects.

Now talking about the gaming performance, which generally favours the Intel CPUs, the new Ryzen CPU performs neck-to-neck with the Intel CPU. Some games help AMD and most of them to Intel, the Ryzen 5 3500X beats the Core i5-9400F in two of the nine tested games.

Both of the chips tie in three of the games and in others the Intel CPU leads the new CPU by 2-5% only which seems negligible.

So to sum up the performance result we can see that the new CPU lives up to the expectations and in both productivity and gaming. Sadly it’s not available to the normal consumers worldwide being a Chinese OEM exclusive.

However, JD.com, a major Chinese retailer, has listed the Ryzen 5 3500X for 1,099 yuan, which approximately translates to $154 on the other hand, the Core i5-9400F can be found for as low as $139.99. So, at $10 price difference this new CPU can be a great option for budget PC gamers and enthusiasts.

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