Ryzen 4000 Mobile CPUs offer benchmark busting multi-core performance on the go, but marketing hype aside, it’s unclear how this will translate to real world performance. Sixteen threads are great for beating benchmarks including UserBenchmark 64-core, Cinebench, Blender-CPU and Handbrake-CPU but gamers need performance in the games that they actually play. At launch, the top GPU available in a 4000 series laptop is the RTX 2060. Since the GPU is largely responsible for overall gaming performance, the Ryzen 4000 laptops will offer mid tier gaming performance at best. Pairing stronger GPUs would be suboptimal because the Zen gaming bottleneck becomes increasingly severe with more powerful GPUs. Streamers and media producers, who may have historically benefited from high core counts, are better off using the GPU (NVENC or QuickSync) for encoding. Leading media creation applications including both DaVinci Resolve and Adobe Premiere Pro are largely GPU bound. With low power consumption and high core counts, the 4000 range, on paper at least, is a perfect fit for the datacenter. AMD should focus on delivering a platform that offers performance where end users actually need it rather than targeting inexperienced gamers with the same old "moar cores" mantra. From a gamer’s perspective, the best feature of the 4000 series laptops is the absence of the equally hyped 5000 series GPUs. Prospective gaming laptop buyers will find lower latency (and therefore better gaming) CPUs combined with faster GPUs at similar price points. [Mar '20CPUPro]
Intel’s Comet Lake flagship, the i9-10900K, is the fastest gaming and desktop CPU currently available. This ten-core hyperthreaded processor can easily be overclocked so that all twenty threads run at an eye-watering 5.2 GHz. Whilst its stellar performance is second to none, it comes with a premium price tag of $488 USD. The 10900K also requires a new (Z490) LGA1200 motherboard, which Intel has indicated will remain compatible with Rocket Lake CPUs which are due later this year. Whilst AMD’s competing $420 USD Ryzen 3900X and $675 USD Ryzen 3950X do have a greater number of cores, their lower clock speeds and higher memory latency handicap them in non-rendering use cases. Overall, the 10900K has a 16% effective speed advantage over both the 3900X and 3950X. Users that do a lot of rendering should investigate dedicated hardware encoders such as NVENC and Quick Sync as these are far more efficient than CPU based rendering. Comparing the 10900K and 10700K shows that, when paired with a 2060S, the 10700K offers comparable gaming performance for 20% less money.[Jun '20CPUPro]
We calculate effective speed which measures real world performance for typical users. Effective speed is adjusted by current prices to yield a value for money rating. Our calculated values are checked against thousands of individual user ratings. The customizable table below combines these factors to bring you the definitive list of top CPUs. [CPUPro]
Welcome to our PC speed test tool. UserBenchmark will test your PC and compare the results to other users with the same components. You can quickly size up your PC, identify hardware problems and explore the best value for money upgrades.