AMD's Rumored Ryzen 5 3500X 6-Core CPU Faces Benchmark Showdown With Intel Core i5-9400F

Ryzen 5 Box
Evidence pointing towards a Ryzen 5 3500X addition to AMD's third-generation Ryzen lineup is stacking up. The latest clue is a validated CPU-Z entry. Submitted by an anonymous user, the Ryzen 5 3500X listing on CPU-Z seemingly provides a glimpse of how the upcoming processor will fare compared to Intel's 9th generation Core i5-9400F.

As previously rumored and now seemingly confirmed in the CPU-Z listing, the Ryzen 5 3500X is a 6-core processor without simultaneous multi-threading (SMT) support. It's said to have a 3.6GHz base clock and 4.1GHz boost clock, 32MB of L3 cache, and a 65W TDP, with a Wraith Stealth air cooler included with the chip.

The new leak was spotted by a Chinese media outlet, but page has since been removed. However, the CPU-Z listing is the real meat here...

AMD Ryzen 5 3500X CPU-Z
Click to Enlarge (Source: CPU-Z)

According the entry, the Ryzen 5 3500X was plopped into a testbed consisting of an MSI B450M Mortar Max motherboard, and accompanied by 16GB (2x8GB) of DDR4-3000 memory, GeForce GTX 1660 graphics card, and 512GB NVMe solid state drive.

The Ryzen 5 3500X scored 476.3 in the single-core test and 2,774.9 in the multi-core test. A separate listing for the Core i5-9400F with the same setup except for the motherboard (MSI B360M Mortar) scored 451.4 in the single-core test and 2,568.2 in the multi-core test.

Based on those measurements, the Ryzen 5 3500X is a tick faster than the Core i5-9400F. Naturally we want to be cautious about drawing any of sort of conclusion based on a leaked benchmarks, but it is interesting nonetheless.

AMD Ryzen 5 3500X Benchmarks
Click to Enlarge (Source: bilibili)

The original source also provided another set of benchmarks showing productivity performance. Here again, the Ryzen 5 3500X outpaces the Core i5-9400F in all four individual tests, and posted a higher overall score of 332,661 versus 317,350.

Finally, the site posted some gaming benchmarks. Here's are the average framerates obtained from a Ryzen 5 3500X setup, with each game run at 1080p...
  • PUBG: 80-85 fps
  • Assassin's Creed: Odyssey: 65 fps (27 fps minimum)
  • Shadow of the Tomb Raider: 77 fps
  • World War Z: 126 fps (109 fps minimum)
  • League of Legends: 180 fps
There is not much to be gleaned from the those figures, since key details are absent, such as the testbed and image quality settings. We also do not have any comparison data from a Core i5-9400F setup (or any other processor).

For what it's worth, previously leaked slides showed a bunch of gaming benchmark comparisons between the Ryzen 5 3500X and Core i5-9400F, both accompanied by a GeForce GTX 1660 graphics card, and they pretty much ran neck-and-neck with one another.

As interesting as all of this is, we will reserve judgement on the Ryzen 5 3500X once we get our hands on one ourselves (assuming it actually exists) and put it through the paces.