Reports have recently surfaced regarding the existence of a handful of Ryzen 5 1600 and 1600X processors that are endowed with 8 working CPU cores. For those who are not aware, both these processors are supposed to feature six CPU cores and 12 threads. CPUs with eight CPU cores are normally reserved for Ryzen 7 family of processors.
According to several sources, most Ryzen 5 1600 and 1600X CPUs that were manufactured between 4 September and 10 September 2017 are found to have eight working CPU cores. Interestingly, these batch of processors were manufactured right here in Malaysia (Penang). It seems rather unlikely that these “core additions” are part of AMD’s plans; this would affect sales of Ryzen 7 CPUs badly.
That said, AMD may have done this on purpose to increase the sales of its mid-range Ryzen 5 CPUs, especially since they’re doing very well in the market today. That aside, let’s talk about performance. Some users who were lucky enough to obtain these affected Ryzen 5 CPUs went on to test them, and surprise, surprise: they perform almost similarly to AMD’s top of the line Ryzen 7 1800X processor – based on synthetic benchmarks, of course.
Regardless, If you’d like to find out whether your Ryzen 5 CPU is affected by this “upgrade”, simply download the CPU-Z tool to check the CPU core count. Alternatively, one can determine CPU core count by using Windows Task Manager as well.
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