This isn’t a revisit of the old AMD Ryzen 5 1600 – it’s a review of the new variant, named the AMD Ryzen 5 1600 “AF” by the community, dubbed as such for its SKU change from AE to AF. The AMD R5 1600 AF is a brand new CPU with an old, old name from 2017. It’s mostly an R5 2600, in that it’s a slower variant of the Zen+ CPU from the 2000-series, but with a 1000-series name. AMD silently released the 1600 AF as an $85 option, but it’s on 12nm instead of 14nm and carries other 2nd-Gen Ryzen features. In today’s review of the new $85 processor, we’ll look at performance versus the original R5 1600, the R5 2600, and overclocking performance, since a 12nm 1600 AF should do about the same OC as a 12nm Ryzen 2000 part, which were typically 100-200MHz higher than the 1000-series.

The R5 1600 AF is a weird, weird refresh. It’s mostly odd that AMD didn’t just name it Ryzen 3 3300X or Ryzen 5 3550. They already have the 3000 family with Zen+ architecture and the 3000G with Zen1 architecture, so it wouldn’t dilute the naming and it’d be a much more successful, higher selling product with a lot of media fanfare. Instead, it just sounds like a two-year-old part, but it’s really not. We can’t fault AMD for its naming and it doesn’t particularly bother us, it’s just a bit odd from a marketing standpoint. Maybe AMD doesn’t want to sell a lot of these.

Our latest GN Special Report is looking at sales data to determine the popularity of both AMD and Intel CPUs amongst our readers, with dive-down data on average selling price, popularity by series (R5, R7, R9, or i7, i9, and so on), and Intel vs. AMD monthly sales volume. We ran a similar report in April of this year, but with Ryzen 3000 behind us, we now have a lot more data to look at. We’ll be comparing 3 full years of affiliate purchases through retail partners to analyze product popularity among the GamersNexus readers and viewers.

This year’s busy launch cadence has meant nearly non-stop CPU and GPU reviews for the past 6 months, but that also gives us a lot of renewed data to work with for market analysis. Intel’s supply troubles have been nearly a weekly news item for us throughout this year, with a few months of reprieve that soon lapsed. With Intel’s ongoing supply shortages and 10nm delays, and with its only launch being refreshes of existing parts, the company was barely present in the enthusiast segment for 2019. Even still, it’s dominating in pre-built computer sales, and ultimately, DIY enthusiast is an incredibly small portion of Intel’s total marketshare and volume. AMD, meanwhile, has had back-to-back launches in rapid succession, which have managed to dominate media coverage for the better part of this year.

Having reviewed over a dozen CPUs this year, it’s time to round-up the Best of 2019 with the first instalment of our annual GN Awards show. In this series, we’ll pick the best products for categories like performance, overall quality, gaming, overclocking, and more. Our goal today is to help you parse the best CPUs in each category so that you can pick the right parts for PC build purchases during Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and other holiday sales. 

At the end of this content, one of the two companies will walk away with a GN Award Crystal for its efforts this year. Our award crystals are 3D laser-engraved glass cubes that feature a GN tear-down logo, replete with easter eggs like MOSFETs, inductors, VRMs, PCIe slots, fans, and even screws, all in 3D.

One of the busiest weeks of the year is fast approaching: We'll soon be dealing with Threadripper 3 reviews and Intel i9-10980XE reviews, alongside the usual year-end content. In the interim, we've still got hardware news to cover, including this week's collection of industry and release topics for Intel, AMD, Crytek, Backblaze, and Corsair.

Show notes continue after the embedded video.

The Threadripper line launched back in 2017, landing between the brand new and impressive Ryzen desktop chips and the extra high core count Epyc server CPUs. This launch lineup included the 8C/16T 1900X, the 12C/24T 1920X, and the 16C/32T 1950X. These were production-targeted CPUs (even more so than the main Ryzen line), best suited to individuals or small businesses doing rendering or heavily multithreaded tasks that didn’t merit a full Epyc server system. The 1920X launched at $800, but two years later it can be found on Amazon for 1/4th of that price. Today we’re going to figure out whether it’s worth even that.

We’ve picked several $200-ish CPUs to compare. The main competitor we’re considering is AMD’s own R5 3600, a chip with half the cores and half the threads. The newest Intel part we have that’s close to $200 is the 9600K, but it’s currently $240 on Amazon and therefore isn’t really a fair comparison. The i5-9400 is $200 new on Amazon and Newegg, but we don’t own one--we haven’t tested something that low on the Intel product stack since the slightly lower-spec i5-8400, so we’ll be using that as a stand-in, with the caveat that the 9400 would perform slightly better. Used and outdated PC hardware is almost always seriously overpriced and the 12C/24T Xeon E5-2697 v2 is no exception, but since it’s almost down to $200 on ebay and has the same core/thread count as the 1920X, we’ll also consider it.

Inspired by megastore compatriot Walmart, it seems Aldi now wants to sell a gaming PC to you alongside your groceries. Assuredly similar in spec, this week's news round-up also talks about the Archer 2 Supercomputer, which is probably equivalent to a few hundred thousand Aldi gaming computers. The Archer 2 will leverage about 748,000 cores built atop the Epyc processor lineup from AMD. More mainstream desktop-oriented news includes Intel's i3 chips potentially becoming more similar to i7s going forward, and PCIe Gen6 looking toward 2021.

Thermal Design Power, or TDP, is a term used by AMD and Intel to refer in an extremely broad sense to the rate at which a CPU cooler must dissipate heat from the chip to allow it to perform as advertised. Sort of. Depending on the specific formula and product, this number often ends up a combination of science-y variables and voodoo mysticism, ultimately culminating in a figure that’s used to beat-down forum users over which processor has a lower advertised “TDP”. With the push of Ryzen 3000, we’re focusing today on how AMD defines TDP and what its formula actually breaks into, and how that differs from the way cooler manufacturers define it. Buying a 95W TDP processor and a 95W TDP CPU cooler doesn’t mean they’re perfectly matched, and TDP is a much looser calculation than most would expect. There’s also contention between cooler manufacturers and CPU manufacturers over how this should be accurately calculated versus calculated for marketing, something we’ll explore in today’s content.

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News this week talks about a few product launches -- some not coming to the West -- and new tech demos for PCIe Generation 5 and CXL. We also cover Intel's ongoing battles with marketing, the Threadripper 3 rumors of incompatibility with X399, and advancements in reverse-engineering silicon products.

Show notes will continued after the embedded video, as always.

The biggest news item this week came in the final hour of filming our weekly news show, and that's the Rockstar Games Red Dead Redemption 2 release for PC. It was a surprise announcement from Rockstar, but we now have a release date, information on updated graphics, and an eclectic mix of launch platforms listed for the PC launch of Red Dead 2. Additional news includes the ongoing lawsuit and countersuit between TSMC and GlobalFoundries, information on the Ryzen Surface products, Intel's X-series Cascade Lake pricing, Ryzen Pro 3000 CPUs, and the FCC's net neutrality rulings.

Hardware news headlines with some AMD 65W TDP parts whose specs were leaked to us in what appear to be official AMD documents, although we also have coverage of Intel's potential for another 14nm shortage, China's entrance into the DRAM market, and more. The DRAM market story is an interesting one, as the three incumbent players -- SK Hynix, Samsung, and Micron -- control functionally 100% of the market, with no new competition for a long time now. Memory supply is also rife with accusations of intellectual property theft and corporate espionage, something not likely to stop anytime soon.

Show notes continue after the embedded video, as always.