The all-core clock frequency has only been increased by 16%, but we have also boosted the memory frequency by 16%. However more crucially are the greatly improved memory sub timings, combine all these factors in a core heavy game and we’re seeing truly massive performance gains. That said it’s well worth nothing that it took an aggressive all core overclock, ultra expensive memory that was custom tuned and an upgraded cooler for the Ryzen 5 2600 to basically match the Core i5-8400 in this title. So while the gains and overall performance was excellent, the cost to achieve it is great.
Counter-Strike Global Offensive is the opposite to Star Wars Battlefront II in the sense that it doesn’t utilize core heavy CPUs at all. Even so the performance margin between the Ryzen 5 2600 and Core i5-8400 wasn’t that big, I was really expecting the 8400 to run away with it in this title. Overclocked the 2600 took charge and was able to edge out the 8400 at both 1080p and 1440p, again the margins weren’t big so overall performance was much the same using either CPU.
For testing Deus Ex: Mankind Divided I’m not using the in-game benchmark, but I am using the DirectX 11 API as this is a better choice when using a GeForce GPU. Here we see better performance from the Core i5-8400 at 720p and 1080p when compared to the stock Ryzen 5 2600 configuration. Overclocking Ryzen does allow it to match and even beat the 8400, we see with the GPU bottleneck removed at 720p that the Ryzen CPU is indeed faster once overclocked. By the time we hit the 1440p resolution the playing field is neutralized and performance is much the for all three test configurations.
Movin go to Dirt 4 and here we see out of the box the Core i5 and Ryzen 5 processors were very competitive at 1080p. The 8400 did run away with it a bit at 720p, though the frame time performance was much the same. Overclocking Ryzen helped push it ahead of the 8400 and interestingly even at 1440p it maintained a reasonable margin.
The results when testing with F1 2017 were similar, though stock the Ryzen 5 processor was less competitive here. Amazingly the 1% low result was boosted by 22% even at 1440p which is incredible and here the 2600 was still 10% faster than the 8400. So a mediocre stock result for the 2600 was saved by an impressive overclocked result.
