Two Years Later, Who Won? Ryzen 5 1600 vs. Core i5-7600K

This is a comparison we've been wanting to put together for some time. With Computex 2022 out of the style and the full confirmation of 3rd-gen Ryzen, before that hits us here's an updated comparison between the Ryzen 5 1600 and Core i5-7600K. It'south time to see which processor offers gamers the best functioning in 2022.

When the R5 1600 was start released, you lot could easily argue in favor of the 7600K as the better gaming CPU. The vast majority of games performed better on the Core i5-7600K and often much faster in what we considered older games at the time. However, for newly released 2022 games they were more evenly matched and in a few core-heavy titles such every bit Ashes of the Singularity, the Ryzen CPU was a lilliputian faster or in Battlefield ane it was overall more than consistent.

We still saw Ryzen processors struggle in a number of titles such as Arma three, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Far Cry Primal, G Theft Auto V, Full State of war Warhammer II, and Spotter Dogs 2 to cite a few prime examples. And even so we liked the Ryzen 5 1600 every bit it was cheaper, held the promise of superior platform support, came with a box cooler and generally crush the Core i5 processor in productivity tasks. In event, for intensive workloads the Ryzen 5 1600 mimicked what we saw from the Core i7-7700K and that was impressive at the time.

For those reasons and more, just two months after its release we named the Ryzen 5 1600 'the all-time value desktop CPU'. While we noted that for high refresh gaming the 7600K would be the better choice, at to the lowest degree in the short term, we did expect the 2 extra cores and viii threads of the Ryzen 5 processor to come in handy before too long. Information technology's been roughly two years since those initial impressions and we haven't revisited this comparison. Most recently the focus has been on Zen+ processors such as the Ryzen v 2600 and 2700. Only today we'll come across how times have inverse and favored one side or the other.

The Ryzen 5 1600 was tested on the MSI B450 Tomahawk using K.Skill Ripjaws V DDR4-3200 CL15 memory. The Core i5-7600K was tested on the Asrock Z270 Taichi with the same Thousand.Skill memory. Both systems were configured using the Xtreme memory profile and MCE was disabled on the Intel arrangement, at to the lowest degree for the stock testing. We used a Gigabyte RTX 2080 Ti Aorus Xtreme and the CPUs were cooled using the Corsair Hydro H100i Pro AIO liquid cooler. Both CPUs were tested stock and so with a realistic overclock applied, so we're not pretending every CPU sold is of the highest quality silicon.

In full at that place are 8 games tested at two resolutions. That translated into over 200 benchmarks runs to create this slice... Let'southward get into the results.

Benchmarks

First up we have Rage two, the newest game we've benchmarked for this article. This title uses the Vulkan API exclusively and we've constitute it'southward not very CPU demanding as it plays very well on a pocket-sized quad-core.

The Core i5-7600K offered a slight performance bump over the Ryzen v 1600, though given the clock speed deficit you'd probably expect the margins to be a greater at 1080p with an RTX 2080 Ti. Moving to 1440p nosotros meet similar margins, the Core i5 processor is a little faster out of the box simply one time nosotros overclocked the margin closes to almost goose egg.

World War Z supports DirectX 11 and Vulkan but for best functioning we ever exam with the latter API. Both CPUs allowed for over 100 fps out of the box, yet the 7600K was fourteen% faster on average. This is another championship that isn't particularly taxing on the CPU and nosotros've found modern quad-cores will get the job washed. Moving to 1440p and we see that the margins are most eliminated, hither the 7600K was ~4% faster out of the box and 3% faster with both CPUs overclocked.

When we beginning benchmarked the Ryzen 1000 series in games, we found Far Cry Primal to exist a particularly bad championship for AMD's new cadre heavy processors. Single thread operation seems to be the central here, that and the games just aren't developed with Ryzen in heed, despite AMD sponsoring the latest installment in the serial, though I believe that was generally to optimize for their Radeon technology.

Whatever the example Ryzen CPUs don't practice well in Far Cry games and we take a practiced case of this hither with Far Cry New Dawn. Although the R5 1600 was able to evangelize shine gameplay information technology was still much slower than the Core i5-7600K which delivered a whopping 25% more performance.

The margins are very similar at 1440p as well, here the R5 1600 isn't able to come back and we saw style better operation out of the 7600K. We're aware that some have reported frame stuttering from even the latest 6-core Core i5 processors in Far Cry v and Far Cry New Dawn, but I have to say the experience was certainly no worse than what we saw from the Ryzen 5 1600.

The Hitman 2 results for the 7600K are really strange. Given how CPU express this championship is you lot'd expect a 23% all core frequency heave to have a rather significant bear on, just it doesn't. We saw just a few more frames from the 7600K once overclocked, we often see strange results when testing with Hitman ii and nosotros honestly don't know what's going on here in our NPC heavy benchmark. The R5 1600, on the other hand, saw a decent half-dozen% functioning boost from a viii% all-core overclock. We come across like margins at 1440p, overall both CPUs delivered a similar gaming feel in Hitman ii.

Things are getting interesting now. Shadow of the Tomb Raider is one of the nigh demanding games released in the concluding year. The Ryzen five 1600 was noticeably smoother in this title and with 22% more than frames on average it was also a lot faster. We can run into even when overclocked the 7600K appears and so heavily choked that the frequency increase doesn't assist, there appears to exist some other kind of performance limitation.

The performance gains for the R5 1600 when overclocked are also very balmy, but they're also much more than in line with the frequency increment. Moving to 1440p and the R5 1600 continues to blitz the 7600K, offering ~30% more functioning with both CPUs overclocked.

The Ryzen 5 1600 also proves to exist the superior option for the Assassin's Creed Odyssey, another modern demanding championship. Here the Ryzen processor offered 16% more performance out of the box. At the more GPU express 1440p resolution the results do come up together but even so once overclocked the R5 1600 still enabled 8% more operation and overall was slightly smoother.

Battlefield Five is the first time nosotros've seen the i5-7600K fall flat on its confront. While notwithstanding playable, the experience was pretty horrible compared to the shine R5 1600. We saw a similar thing in our day ane Ryzen coverage, though not quite to this extent. Dorsum and so the 7600K provided college frame rates on average, but the 1% depression performance was weaker.

Today when testing with Battlefield Five the i% low performance is a disaster for the 7600K and this means although the R5 1600 was only slightly faster on average the actually gaming experience was worlds improve. The Cadre i5-7600K crash and burned at 1440p, this is a game that just requires more than than 4 cores and threads, even if they're clocked at or around 5 GHz.

Another series of horrible results for the Core i5-7600K can be seen when testing with The Segmentation ii. The Ryzen CPU was 33% faster out of the box when comparing the average frame charge per unit and 32% faster for the i% depression result. That margin is reduced once both CPUs are overclocked, though the margin was still ~25% faster on average and 24% faster for the 1% low.

The Ryzen 5 1600 remains well alee at 1440p and even with both CPUs overclocked is the clear winner hither.

What We Found

For those that skipped to this betoken nosotros'll quickly summarize: overall the Ryzen 5 1600 was noticeably slower in a single game, namely Far Cry New Dawn. Functioning was still very playable, just frame rates were well down on the Core i5-7600K. Ryzen was also slightly slower in World State of war Z and it was a describe in Rage 2 and Hitman ii. As we moved into more demanding mod titles, we plant the R5 1600 to be a good bit faster in Assassinator'south Creed Odyssey and then overwhelmingly faster when testing with Battleground V, Shadow of the Tomb Raider and The Division two.

These findings are inline with what nosotros said and found two years ago. Back so the i5-7600K was a tad faster in the majority of games, still Ryzen showed a lot of hope when performing well in the most CPU demanding games of the time, delivering more consistent functioning. We recommended the Ryzen 5 1600 over the Cadre i5-7600K in 2022 for a number of reasons, many relevant at the time, but one that is relevant today is that we believed information technology'd be the better gaming CPU in the long run and that happens to be the case.

Taking all this into consideration, if you were faced with upgrading or edifice a new gaming PC in mid-2017 and had the choice between these 2 processors, you could say going with the 7600K was a fault. Today the R5 1600 is the superior performer enabling highly playable performance in all the latest games, while the 7600K struggles in a number of titles.

As a bonus, if you invested in the AM4 platform two years ago, you now have the luxury of upgrading to what we expect to be a much more powerful Zen ii processor without having to alter your motherboard. Core i5-7600K owners on the other hand would have to pay through the olfactory organ for a 7700K merely to enable playable performance in titles such equally Battlefield V. In fact, there'southward nigh no chance y'all'll country a second hand 7700K for less than what a brand new Ryzen five 3600X costs.

For this article our sole focus was on gaming performance, but if yous care about core heavy application performance, there isn't much to talk over. The R5 1600 thrashed the 7600K at launch and nothing has inverse in that location (benchmarks from our original review beneath, for more than go hither).

If annihilation Ryzen has but improved in workstation tasks as software continues to be optimized for the Zen compages. The platform has matured a lot, besides, and it'due south now faster and more than stable. Meanwhile the Intel Kaby Lake range along with all their processors take become slower due to the security vulnerabilities that were publicly revealed in early 2022 and a few more recently. Hopefully next time you accept the states benchmarking a Ryzen processor information technology volition be the brand new 3000 series, until the next 1.