AMD Ryzen 5 1600X Review

 AMD's Ryzen 7 launch earlier this year went off pretty much without a hitch. A lot was riding on it, considering that before this, AMD hadn't managed to put out a CPU worth getting excited about in nearly a decade. The Ryzen 7 family targets relatively high-end buyers, and we were promised that the Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 3 lines, with fewer cores and lower speeds, would follow in due course. So far, the company has kept all its promises, and so we now have with us a Ryzen 5 1600X CPU for review.This is the most powerful and highest priced of the four Ryzen 5 models currently available. It is carefully calibrated to take on Intel's Core i5 CPUs, hitting them in their biggest weak spot. The target audience is mainstream users and enthusiasts who want it all, but who still see the merits of saving money where they can. We're going to see how it stacks up against the mighty Ryzen 7 1800X which we tested at launch time, and whether Intel should be worried about losing its grip on this extremely important market segment.