AMD Zen 3 Ryzen Deep Dive Review: 5950X, 5900X, 5800X and 5600X Tested
by Dr. Ian Cutress on November 5, 2020 9:01 AM ESTGaming Tests: Borderlands 3
As a big Borderlands fan, having to sit and wait six months for the EPIC Store exclusive to expire before we saw it on Steam felt like a long time to wait. The fourth title of the franchise, if you exclude the TellTale style-games, BL3 expands the universe beyond Pandora and its orbit, with the set of heroes (plus those from previous games) now cruising the galaxy looking for vaults and the treasures within. Popular Characters like Tiny Tina, Claptrap, Lilith, Dr. Zed, Zer0, Tannis, and others all make appearances as the game continues its cel-shaded design but with the graphical fidelity turned up. Borderlands 1 gave me my first ever taste of proper in-game second order PhysX, and it’s a high standard that continues to this day.
BL3 works best with online access, so it is filed under our online games section. BL3 is also one of our biggest downloads, requiring 100+ GB. As BL3 supports resolution scaling, we are using the following settings:
- 360p Very Low, 1440p Very Low, 4K Very Low, 1080p Badass
BL3 has its own in-game benchmark, which recreates a set of on-rails scenes with a variety of activity going on in each, such as shootouts, explosions, and wildlife. The benchmark outputs its own results files, including frame times, which can be parsed for our averages/percentile data.
| AnandTech | Low Resolution Low Quality |
Medium Resolution Low Quality |
High Resolution Low Quality |
Medium Resolution Max Quality |
| Average FPS |  |
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| 95th Percentile |  |
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All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
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GeoffreyA - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link
Battling to load the article for hours, but looks like it's finally working. On page 3 now.GeoffreyA - Friday, November 6, 2020 - link
Thanks for the excellent analysis, AT. Zen 3 has delivered, even more than expected. Brings back memories of the Athlon 64 FX-51 at the top of charts and later the Core 2 Duo, which left K8 dead on the floor. I am impressed by the IPC's having gone up so much but power remaining roughly the same. And, besides the widening, surprisingly conservative, there are a lot of "intelligent" techniques bringing about improvement (reminiscent of the Pentium M in a way). All in all, outstanding work from AMD. The engineers deserve a round of applause.GeoffreyA - Saturday, November 7, 2020 - link
Ian, not sure if I missed it, but what version of Windows does the test suite use? The CPU overload article says 1909. According to Techpowerup, there have been some scheduler changes since 1903 and the difference in performance was a few per cent. for Zen 3. Thanks.https://www.techpowerup.com/review/amd-ryzen-9-590...
mjcutri - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link
Was pleasantly surprised that I was able to pick up a 5600x from newegg this morning. It'll be a nice upgrade from my i7-3920 that I've been running for 8 years!lmcd - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link
The thing that's so funny to me is how well Sandy Bridge E has held up. Nearly every board supports PCIe 3.0 and SATA III, quad-channel memory means it's not memory bound, and it clocks up quite well.Obviously performance per watt sucks and it doesn't game as well anymore, but the feature set is way more usable than I'd ever have expected 8 years later.
Spunjji - Sunday, November 8, 2020 - link
It was a really solid platform. Throw in an SSD on PCIe and you wouldn't miss an awful lot from a more modern system, but it looks like that point has finally been reached... 8 years later!lmcd - Monday, November 9, 2020 - link
I wish both Intel and AMD would bring prosumer platforms back. While obviously SLI and XF are dead, PCIe lanes are nice to have and I/O futureproofing is actually impossible anymore.Qasar - Tuesday, November 10, 2020 - link
id just like to see more PCIe lanes. maybe 8-16 more ?Vitor - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link
The craziest thing is that AMD has a very easy upgrade path with 5nm being avaible.CrystalCowboy - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link
5 nm, DDR5, PCIe 5, USB4. These are all obvious future developments. They will do a new socket for that; will be interesting to see what they do with that.