AMD Ryzen 5 2600X + Ryzen 7 2700X Linux Benchmarks

While the Ryzen 5 2600X / Ryzen 7 2700X Linux gaming performance leaves room for improvement against the Core i7 8700K with not many Linux games being able to scale past a few CPU cores and Intel delivering greater IPC performance, these real-world Linux benchmark results today show there is quite a bit of CPU performance potential out of these new Ryzen+ processors.

The Ryzen 7 2700X has a slightly lower boost clock speed than the Core i7 8700K, but for workloads that can take advantage of all available threads, this Zen CPU has a lot to offer. Fortunately, there are many thread-happy Linux workloads from code compilation being a daily task for many users to various scientific, modeling, and other development software.

The launch price of $329 USD for the Ryzen 7 2700X is certainly very competitive with the Core i7 8700K still retailing for $349 USD as of this morning while the Ryzen 5 2600X delivers very nice value at just $229 USD for a six-core / 12-thread CPU that boosts above 4GHz. With either CPU there is also the potential for pushing the performance higher thanks to these parts being unlocked, but the overall power AC system power consumption is higher than a comparable Core i7 8700K system.

If though you aren't engaging in many multi-threaded workloads, some benchmarks like Redis show that there still is room for improvement with Zen as Intel is still leading on the instructions per clock front, but it will be interesting to see what comes of next-gen Zen processors.

Aside from the performance results, the overall Linux experience has been great for launch day with no problems to report when using modern Linux distributions aside from the k10temp driver reporting incorrect CPU temperatures at least as of the Linux 4.16 kernel. But that's likely just an offset issue and will hopefully trickle down as a stable fix in the near future for reporting correct CPU temperatures, which is relevant if you are planning on overclocking your AMD Pinnacle Ridge system. Both the MSI X470 GAMING M7 AC and ASUS ROG CROSSHAIR VII HERO motherboards have been playing well with Linux.

I certainly hope you enjoyed these initial launch-day results for the Ryzen 5 2600X and Ryzen 7 2700X. Thanks to AMD for supplying the review samples and follow-up AMD Zen+ Linux CPU tests will be coming on Phoronix in the days and weeks ahead as we look at other areas of the system performance.