Synthetic System Benchmarks
We are going to start with synthetic system application benchmarks on this page. Gaming performance will be shown later on. In the graphs, AMD Ryzen 7 5800X PBO indicates Precision Boost Override being enabled in the BIOS for a +200MHz official AMD PBO overclock. Otherwise, AMD Ryzen 7 5800X represents default CPU performance without PBO. The Ryzen 7 3700X is also tested at default, without PBO.
PCMark 10
Standard PCMark Benchmark
In the first graph, we are looking at PCMark 10 standard benchmark test, which is an overall system test. PCMark 10 runs a gauntlet of different office, content creation, and desktop workloads. Typical, non-gaming stuff. We can see here that the newer AMD Ryzen 5 5600X improves overall system desktop performance by 11% compared to the Ryzen 5 3600X as an upgrade in desktop performance. PBO adds slightly more performance, just 1%.
PCMark Application Benchmark
In this graph, we are looking at PCMark 10’s Applications Benchmark. This test is very specific, it tests the performance of Microsoft Office, using Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and even Edge. We have found this test to be rather sensitive to clock speed instead of core count. We also find that Microsoft Office gets a boost in performance with the Ryzen 5 5600X here, 14% which is very respectable for a generational improvement just in office apps considering the CPUs have the same core and thread count. PBO, which increases the max boost clock improves performance by another 2%, which clock speed seems to affect office applications more than anything.
Geekbench 5
Next up we have the latest version of Geekbench 5. This benchmark tests overall CPU performance and can show us a result in both multi-core and single-core performance. According to Geekbench 5, the multi-core performance of Ryzen 5 5600X is 10% faster than the Ryzen 5 3600X, this is all down to architecture changes as both CPUs have the same core count. PBO improves performance by another 1%.
One of the big advantages of the Zen 3 architecture was an increase in IPC in single-thread performance. We see that directly play out here, with Geekbench 5 showing us a 24% single-core performance jump over the Ryzen 5 3600X! That’s a very large single-thread/core performance jump from Zen 2 to Zen 3, 3600X to 5600X. That right there tells us upgrading to the 5600X can make a big difference, especially if you are more single-core/thread focused. Increasing the frequency with PBO gets us another 4% which is very respectable for such an easy overclock to enable.
PassMark PerformanceTEST
In PassMark’s PerformanceTEST we are using the CPU Mark only benchmark which benchmarks several CPU-related scenarios. The newer Ryzen 5 5600X improves performance over the last generation Ryzen 5 3600X by 19% here, which is a very noticeable and worthwhile performance upgrade from the last generation. PBO doesn’t add much performance in this benchmark. The large performance impact is coming from the newer Zen 3 architecture itself.