Perhaps Tomb Raider’s relatively positive reaction to high thread counts is why the 2697 v2 averaged 100.2 FPS, still the worst of our four $200 CPUs but not so far behind the 1920X this time.We didn’t test overclocking on Threadripper parts this time around because it’s only become more pointless. XMP is used on the Corsair memory in our test benches.Starting with decompression, the 3900X and 1950X are similar in performance, but they’re also close in price. X399 is becoming a dead platform, so keep that in mind too.All tests are conducted multiple times for parity and then averaged, with outliers closely and manually inspected. At 811 points, the 1920X is close to the R5 2600, the R7 1700 when overclocked, and worse than the $200 i5-8400.
1% and .1% lows are abysmal for every CPU in this test, but the averages are still comparable. These are determined by taking thousands of test results per benchmark and determining standard deviation for each individual test and product. The newest Intel part we have that’s close to $200 is the 9600K, but it’s currently $240 on Amazon and therefore isn’t really a fair comparison. It should be no surprise, then that the 1920X struggles to prove value in this workload. The 3900X leads with a 9-minute render time.
The $200 E5-2697 v2 takes 35 minutes to complete the same render, showing its age in a serious way, while the R5 3600 at $200 finishes the same job in 31 minutes. The i5-8400 has less of an advantage over the game-mode 1920X than it did in the Battle benchmark at 147.6FPS average, but that’s still an 18.5% uplift. The 3600 averaged 115 FPS or 116.2FPS with the 4.3GHz overclock, and performed significantly worse with SMT disabled this time at 106.6FPS. (For login issues, please ctrl+F5)V-Ray by Chaos Group is next. For Blender, the goal is to render the scene as fast as possible.
It’s up to game developers to code software that (at the bare minimum) doesn’t perform worse with 8+ threads, and they’re getting there slowly. The 3600 also performed well at 137.6 FPS average, with a slight bump from overclocking but a more dramatic decrease down to 131.6FPS from disabling SMT. CPU-Z Benchmark (x64 - 2017.1) Best CPU performance - 64-bit - July 2020. We use an internal peer review process where one technician runs tests, then the other reviews the results (applying basic logic) to ensure everything looks accurate. The i5-8400 doesn’t need to worry about that and therefore averaged a healthy 156.8 FPS, and the R5 3600 just above it at 158.9 FPS average. Finally we’ve come to a game where it outperforms the 6C/6T i5-8400, which averaged 103.5 FPS.
The main competitor we’re considering is AMD’s own R5 3600, a chip with half the cores and half the threads.