UserBenchmark is run by a brave team of scientists who stand alone against a world-wide conspiracy.
For there is a hoarde of incompetent ‘moar core’ marketers selling ice to Elsa. Their words,
not mine! If Userbenchmark is to be believed, then most review sites are part of this conspiracy.
Hardware Unboxed is part of it. Linustechtips most definitely is. Just look at him! But Userbenchmark
exists to expose the corruption, and to let the world know the truth: that AMD is rubbish and
you shouldn’t buy any products from them. In reviews on their site, when everybody
else was praising Ryzen for offering better value for money and moar cores than similarly
priced Intel products, Userbenchmark was the only one to notice the importance of Intel’s
superior single core performance, and now that Ryzen’s got superior single core performance,
Userbenchmark is bravely pointing out that Intel is offering better value for money and moar cores.
Brave indeed. I covered this brave company… exactly a year ago, actually.
And now I’m doing the same again because a few interesting things have happened in this last
year to have changed the situation. And while Userwenchark is as blatantly anti-AMD as usual,
you may now find yourself agreeing with some of the things they’re saying. If not for the
reasons for them saying it. Let’s begin.
To summarise: when AMD’s Ryzen 5000 series was released, they were undisputedly
faster than Intel’s offerings. You can know this for a fact because even Busermeanshark
begrudgingly admitted it. Even now, after newer generations of Intel products have been released,
AMD’s 5000 series of processors remain blazingly fast,
they scale right up to the ultra high-end, and they sip power compared to Intel’s products.
Unfortunately, until now, the Ryzen 5000 series has neglected budget users.
To understand what’s going on here, we must look to past generations of Ryzen. So when you go to
buy a new processor, after setting yourself a price budget, probably the most important
decision to make is the number of cores you want. Say, for instance, you want 8. Historically,
AMD has offered faster processors with an ‘X’ at the end of their names, indicating that they have
faster cores. But anybody looking for the best value for money will instead opt for the ones
without the ‘X’ on the end, because they’re a bit cheaper, and not much slower. So with the first
generation of Ryzen, you’d go for the 1700, the second, you’d go for the 2700… and with the 3000
series, you can already see it starting to change. They were no longer offering a non-X version,
and later in the generation started paving the way for even more premium ‘XT’ versions…
which nobody bought because it wasn’t worth it. And the 5000 series has got even worse with this.
At launch, the 5800X was the ONLY 8 core processor they offered. And at $450, it was the most
expensive 8-core Ryzen that AMD had ever released, apart from the 1800X. And I’m not against these
sorts of products! They make sense, IF you want the fastest 8 core processor that AMD can create.
But if you’re in the market for an affordable 8 core, then the 5000 series was the first that
didn’t cater to your needs. Where was the $330 option? Of course, I know why AMD did this. They
didn’t have competition at the time from Intel, so didn’t need to offer price-competitive parts. I
knew at the time that cheaper 6 and 8 cores were going to come eventually -AMD had deliberately
left gaps in the naming schemes for them- but sure enough, it required Intel to step up their game
first, and even then, AMD waited a LONG time before providing alternatives. And the reason
they priced the 5800X at $450 in the first place wasn’t accidental- it was to tempt people to spend
even more! For just $100 more, the 12-core 5900X suddenly looked like very good value for money.
But this left budget buyers in a difficult spot. The cheapest option available was the 5600X,
which priced at $300, priced it more like the cost of an earlier 8 core, than a 6 core!
For anybody looking for something BELOW that, you’re out of luck! You’ll have to
hope that a 3000 series of processor is still in stock somewhere, and even then,
these budget offerings were virtually impossible to find anywhere. You could argue why this was,
but the truth is that slowly, the budget lineup has been drying up, as Ryzen has placed itself
higher and higher up the pricing segments. Now this is a far cry of AMD of old- 6 cores
were $220 in 2017, and there was always an excellent sub-$150 lineup. There were
even sub-$100 4 and 6 core CPUs for a while. The 5000 series needed some budget heroes!
Even when AMD eventually rolled out the G series of processors, they still neglected the budget
market. The 5600G and 5700G are great processors to tide you over until you get your own graphics
card, but starting at $260, they simply don’t serve the same purpose as the older products
like the 3200G which were great for building ultra-budget gaming and office rigs with.
In last year’s video I speculated about how Userbenchmark was going to twist their reviews
of the G series to make it negative. And to their credit… they didn’t do that. In fact,
they didn’t even review them- meaning AMD’s product pages on that site have instead defaulted
to generic readouts of benchmark figures- which describes them as an ‘excellent result’.
So how about that- Userbenchmark’s product reviews have been improved
by them literally not doing them. But since the only new potentially
budget AMD processor, the 5300G, only showed up in pre-built PCs, it means that PC builders
have again, been left without a budget offering. Luckily for us, Intel have decided to become what
Ryzen used to be, by offering more for less money! Their new 11000 and 12000 series of processors may
be more power-hungry than AMD’s are, but they are also very fast and more affordable, across all the
product tiers. But where they’ve really excelled has been in the budget range – notably filling
the exciting sub-£200 6 core market that AMD has left vacant. And these are GOOD processors.
https://www.tomshardware.com/uk/news/intel-core-i5-12400-review So in other words: the roles have
reversed! And it’s hard to argue with Intel’s value proposition here.
So I actually agree with HuserShenchmark calling AMD out for this. They go about it in the wrong
way, criticising AMD for bundling the product with a free and perfectly adequate CPU cooler,
slagging off their past products then they accuse AMD of misleading marketing- it still astounds
me that they dedicated so much of a product summary to unrelated and unfounded claims.
But ignoring that nonsense, I do agree with their sentiment that you can get
something similar for less money elsewhere. But things will soon be changing! AMD FINALLY
got around to cutting their prices just the other month, and later in this month they will
be releasing much more affordable 4 and 6 core processors. And about time! As this is exactly
what Bencharkchamarkchamark wanted, if these products turn out to be as good as they look
then I am absolutely sure that their reviews of these products will be positive.
WON’T THEY, Userbenchmark. Yes, they will. In conclusion: they are now arguing that
‘good value’ is more important than ‘fastest performance’. Which is what the rest of us
have been saying all along. Let’s hope they stick to that, no matter which company is delivering.
Curiously though, it appears that Userbenchmark still puts value on the high-end, insisting that
Intel has matched or out-performed AMD in this regard every year so far. So I’m curious to see
what happens with the 5800X3D, also due out later this month, which AMD claims will be the fastest
gaming CPU in the world. Since Userwimwim’s all about that EFPS, you’d think it would be all over
this fastest processor ever! But apparently not. Some how, they already have a product
summary on their site, warning that in practice it will be slower than AMD’s older 5800X is. So
you have been warned- if AMD products get good reviews, it’s being shilled! And if it’s bad,
you can bet that this site will be the first to let you know! Thank God for UserPantMark.