A Performance Review: AMD’s Ryzen 5 2600X & Ryzen 7 2700X Processors

(All of our tests are explained in detail on page 2.)

As seen on the previous page, rendering can take amazing advantage of even the biggest processors, but video encoding is not that far behind – if at all. Even the free conversion tool HandBrake can take advantage of our sixteen-thread processors to significantly decrease encode times. For our video encoding purposes, we use Adobe’s Premiere Pro, as well as HandBrake.

To a lesser degree, music conversion and image manipulation can also see benefits on beefier chips, so Adobe’s Lightroom and dBpoweramp will be used to help us gauge that performance.

Adobe Premiere Pro

While Intel generally dominates the multi-media performance landscape, straight-forward encodes that can take advantage of many cores can still see great benefit on AMD hardware. We’re yet again seeing an example of the 2700X beating out the 8700K pretty handily, and the 2600X barely falls that far behind the much more expensive Coffee Lake chip.

With 8K encodes, not a thing changes on the scaling front (that I can see). The 2700X continues to deliver great performance, and it’s clear that if you have a good GPU, sometimes that itself might take over the lion’s share of the work, but faster CPUs still help more work get done. This article is about Ryzen 2, but it’s impossible to ignore the value proposition of a chip like the 1950X, seeing it slot just under the much more expensive Intel competition.

For more information about CPU+GPU with Premiere Pro, I’d recommend checking out this section from an article earlier this year which shows that a CPU+GPU can lead to much better CPU efficiency than if you just use the CPU itself. It’s as if the CPU chokes itself, but the GPU helps things keep running smooth. So, whenever you’re in doubt, you definitely want to introduce GPU acceleration when it’s available (CUDA or OpenCL) in PP.

HandBrake

Here, we finally begin to see Intel’s real strengths in multi-media. The x265 encodes perform far better on Intel than AMD, while x264 scales pretty much as expected. Here, the 2700X manages to match the 8-core 7820X perfectly with the x264 encode, but it of course falls behind with x265.

Adobe Lightroom & dBpoweramp

With Lightroom, we see another example of Intel’s media prowess. Again, this isn’t much of a surprise, since Intel directly works with Adobe on optimizations. While Lightroom Classic 7.1 is used for testing here, 7.2 would shave another ~10 seconds off each export on Intel (I have not tested AMD’s gains yet).

Ultimately, because AMD can’t match certain Intel strengths in media, it falls well behind in Lightroom. But thanks to its overall brawn, it strikes back with dBpoweramp, a straight-forward FLAC to MP3 process. With that test, the 2600X doesn’t keep far behind the 8700K.