Application & Synthetic Testing
Sandra Memory Bandwidth
Note: All systems were run in dual channel mode using timings of 16,18,18,36@1T.
It’s rather odd that the Ryzen 5 3400G of all things would do the best out of all our test systems in this specific instance but it does.
Sandra CPU Dhrystone
In this test, we can see the 2nd generation Ryzen 5 3400G showing the limitations of its thread count and even its architecture. However, the results are fairly close to what you’d expect comparing this CPU to the Ryzen 5 2700X from last generation. The interesting and surprising part is how well the Intel Core i5 9400 does here. It offers substantially more performance in this test for only a little bit more money.
It’s also worth noting that per the usual, overclocking the Ryzen 5 3400G doesn’t yield much improvement. The fact is that the 2nd generation Ryzen’s all hit the wall around 4.2GHz which is precisely what this CPU offers in terms of boost clocks. Obviously, locking the clocks in has a positive result albeit a minor one.
PCMark 10
Here we find the Ryzen 5 3400G putting up a very good showing here. While the results at stock speeds are nothing spectacular, in the context of price what we are seeing isn’t terrible. It even manages to compete well with CPU’s that are considerably more expensive when overclocked. The Ryzen 5 3600X is only marginally faster as is the Core i5 9400.
WinRAR – Multithread
WinRAR is a bit of a perplexing test at times. On one hand, you can argue that file compression is representative of a real world workload. Oddly, WinRAR seems to both benefit from clock speeds and core counts. It’s a weird dichotomy between these factors which often yields interesting results. In this case, we see the Ryzen 5 3400G perform worse while being overclocked. Both results are behind the 6 core Intel Core i5 9400, which isn’t all that surprising. As we’ve seen in the past, SMT or Hyperthreading isn’t the same as having more physical cores.
WinRAR – Single Thread
In our single thread WinRAR test, we see identical performance from the Ryzen 5 3400G regardless of how its configured. The Core i5 9400 boasts more impressive performance as it even beats out the Ryzen 5 2700X which was king of AMD’s last-generation Ryzen lineup, a generation this Ryzen 5 3400G is clearly part of.
wPrime v2.10
AMD’s Ryzen 5 3400 comes in nearly dead last in this test. The Ryzen 5 2700X of yesteryear does only slightly better at stock speeds than the overclocked 3400G. This is another case where manual overclocking of the Ryzen 5 3400G proves to be a detriment to performance. The Core i5 9400 once again bests AMD’s 3400G with relative ease although it still trails all of our other configurations save for the Ryzen 5 2700X.
POV-Ray
In this test, we see AMD’s SMT implementation carry the Ryzen 5 3400G to a point where it nearly matches the 6 core Core i5 9400. Overclocked, the 3400G comes much closer than it does at stock speeds. This is probably due more to the elimination of frequency ramping latency or it indicates that the boost clocks varied somewhat over the course of the test and didn’t remain at the full 4.2GHz the entire time I was watching it.