Since I got my hands onto AMD’s Ryzen 7 3700X, and since my current CPU in the main editing PC behind me has the same core and thread count as it, that being Intel’s a bit over 5 years old 8 core 16 thread Core i7 5960X, which was back then an enthusiasts level CPU coming from the X79 platform and with a pretty hefty 1000$ price tag, I was thinking why not compare these two CPU’s, just for the fun of it.
And that sums this whole theme. I didn’t do this for sake of trying to prove something, it’s just a retrospective look of then and now. I know that I could overclock the 5960X to well over 4,0 GHz and bring in some decent performance bump with that, I held mine for quite a long period until it became unstable for my needs, those being a lot of Premiere Pro and After Effects editing, so I had to put stability before everything, especially since this is my personal PC. I actually tried to overclock it a bit for the purpose of this testing, but during that process, I had a couple of BSOD’s, which is common thing when trying to find a stable frequency, one of those BSOD’s took out an SSD of mine, so, unfortunately, lost some projects. So, yeah, that happened and I didn’t want to force anything further and just did an out of the box 5960X vs 3700X comparison.
Of course, it’s not that hard to predict the results, it’s obvious that the new and very capable Ryzen 7 3700X will outperform it on a count of its generational architectural improvements, but I really wanted to see what can we today get performance-wise with that same amount of core and thread count, but for a third of the price.
Since I have a GTX 1050 Ti series graphics card in my main editing PC, I’ve also used the same series card in the Ryzen system, just so we can have somewhat of a level field, since I before all want to see the difference in the rendering times using Premiere Pro, which is something that I use the most on my daily PC. I didn’t want to put anything stronger this GPU series, just so the CPU can take over more load and thus having, conditionally speaking, larger influence on the rendering time or to put it differently, the more visible performance difference between these two CPUs.
Core i7 5960X vs Ryzen 7 3700X – then and now
Just a short disclaimer before I start, as I said at the beginning, this is not a super-serious apples to apples, clock per clock comparison, this video idea came to me out of nowhere, which is why I wanted to focus more on the raw performance comparison with your few common CPU benchmarks, just a straightforward synthetic benchmark comparison, plus, before all, I currently can’t reproduce from scratch perfect testing environment since his PC behind me is my daily machine, so it needs to be up and running so I can do my day to day work on it. I also assume that a really small amount of people will benefit from this comparison, since this Intel’s CPU is not a mainstream model, so this will be more of an exploring type of video just to satisfy some curiosity. I’m planning to do a build based on the new Ryzen platform, I’m just not sure if I’m going to go for something like Fractal Vector RS chassis or maybe something smaller, ITX based.
With that said, my personal PC has double the RAM compared to my test rig, 32 instead of 16 GB, although running at a slower speed, but both of that will not affect my bottom line which I’m hunting for here, and that’s to see that raw performance difference, it’s not like we’re expecting a 2-3% of the difference between these two CPU’s, it will be much bigger, so I really don’t have to nitpick. Of course, we have to have in mind that Ryzen’s 7 3700X cores roughly run at 400-800 MHz faster than the cores on Intel’s Core i7 5960X, which by itself brings in a decent performance jump, to begin with, while as I said, they both have the same amount of cores and threads. Last but not the least, this Ryzen test system has a clean Windows install, since my personal PC has been running for the last year, so it may perform a bit worse on a count of that, but again, nothing that it will affect the bigger picture, I just wanted you to know this.
Actually, I’m planning to do a couple of more video with this Ryzen 3700X, before all I’m aiming to build an ITX gaming/editing build with it, which will probably end up replacing my current personal system, so be sure to stick around and subscribe for that one! Until then, let’s jump over and check out the performance comparison.
Frequency prevails in the 3700X vs 5960X comparison
First, in line, of course, is the one and only Cinebench. I’ve used both the R15 and R20 versions, and as you can see here, with no surprise whatsoever, in this 3700X vs 5960X battle, the Ryzen 7 3700X beats Intel i7 5960X by a whopping margin of around 60% in multi-core testing in both version, and with a 50% in R15 and 60% in R20 difference when it comes to the single-core testing, all thanks to its architectural and IPC advantage, paired with higher clocks. This theme continues on with other CPU intensive benchmarks, like the Blender, 7-Zip compression, and POV-Ray testing, where the Ryzen 7 3700X roughly brings in on average 50% performance increase compared to the Core i7 5960X.
Coming to the part of testing in which I was most interested in checking out, Adobe Premiere Pro, in particular the rendering time, I’ve used a 1-minute long 4K clip stacked with few After Effects sequences and color adjustment layers, which makes it overall more CPU intensive. So, what did I saw here? Using both the GPU and CPU for rendering, the Ryzen 7 3700X did the export in about 11 and a half minutes, while the Core i7 5960X did the same job by about 2 and 30 minutes slower. Knowing that most of the job is done by the GPU when it comes to rendering, the fact that CPU managed to lower down the rendering time by about 20%, speaks for itself. Once it gets paired with a stronger GPU, it’s going to be an even better combination for video editing and rendering.
Since these are GTX 1050 Ti series graphics cards in question, I haven’t done any game testing, but rather just the 3DMark one as you can see it here, so you can have at least some reference. This is before all because I don’t have any modern title on my main editing PC, expect few FPV quad simulators, as my drives are pretty much constantly full with recorded content, but when I do want to play, I use the test PC configuration since it’s loaded up with games. On the other hand, this Intel’s CPU was never meant for gaming, but rather productivity work, especially since it boosts only up to 3,5 GHz.
Everybody benefits from Intel vs ADM competition
With the same GPU’s in question, and most importantly with those being on the lower end of the gaming food chain, the results are expectantly basically the same on the graphics score side of things since both CPU’s can push them to their maximal performance potential, but on the other hand, the Ryzen 7 3700X again takes an easy win in the portion of the benchmark where only the CPU is tested. Of course, it would make more sense for us to have a stronger GPU, just so we’re not bottlenecked by its lack of power, thus utilizing and showing the exact CPU’s potential to pull the best out of it, but I have no doubt with everything shown here, that that will be the case with a stronger GPU.
Of course, there’s a bunch of other things that go in Ryzen’s favor, like power consumption and TDP which, both basically the half of the Intel’s, plus it has a larger L3 cache, all in all, everything you would expect improvement wise when we consider five years of difference between them, but putting that aside for a moment, it was very interesting to see how these two CPU’s stack against each other, not that was trying to prove anything with it, I was just personally interested in seeing what does 5 years later mean in this particular field, and I must admit, that feels light-years away, and it sort of is when you look at the current market, not only that you get 50% more performance for a third of a price, but how to tables have completely turned, and Intel’s is now the one who has some catching up to do.
That’s it for this time from me, I hope this Core i7 5960X vs Ryzen 7 3700X comparison shows how far we’ve come in the last five years, if you have any question feel free to hit me in the comments section of my YouTube video listed above, you can contact me via my social media channels!
