Upgrading from a 10 year old PC which was a 2.20 Gz Dual-Core HP Pavilion to my first custom PC using this CPU as the center piece. It comes without saying that I was no longer being shackled down by the limitation of my old PC with my work flow and also the games I play multitasking with no issues. It's teamed up with an MSI Radeon RX 560 AERO ITX 4G OC128-bit 4GB graphic card.
There's tons of tests on how well this CPU performs with games especially mainstream games that I do not need to go into as I'm more into video stuff so watching YouTube videos in 1080p is something else coming from 480p tho without realizing it I still find myself watching in 480p at times. Old habits. Watching 1080p HEVC videos with no lag is again something else to behold, heck, Ryzen 5 2600 isn't on his final form yet with that stuff. [Edit Oct 2020] Viewing 4K YouTube videos is also no issues either. Exceptions of course is based on your internet speed's capacity to buffer fast. Not sure about watching in 4K HEVC video tho since my monitor is only 1080p.
[Edit Oct 25, 2020] Video encoding can take 30 min to 10 hours depending on the length, resolution, and which chroma sampling profile is being used, any filters will add to the encoding time. A 24 min clip with veryslow or placebo settings (with filters) are no problem speed-wise with H.264 10 bit encodes. From either 4:2:0 or 4:4:4 chroma sampling profile finishes it up quick with 18 thread encoding speed! This coming from almost an entire day's worth on my old PC's pitiful 3 threads using the same settings. Regular H.264 8 bit will use 15 threads as its max (if --thread=0 is used) and will obviously be much faster then its 10 bit counterpart. I recommend trying out tesa + subme 11 mode with either profiles if time isn't an issue.
Not tested it with HEVC as of yet.
[Edit - Oct 25, 2020] A few sample tests using HEVC 4:4:4 720p with veryslow and sea mode settings (no tune) of a 24 min clip took about 2-13 hours depending on the amount of filters being applied (such as heavy-duty filters like Anti-Aliasing) with max 12 numa-pools (it's kinda like --thread in H.264 but not really?) if left at its default. The profile 8 bit, 10 bit, or 12 bit will either shorten or increase the time, However, the trade of will be higher quality such as more smoother gradients decreasing banding, color format (both at the cost of increased computation during playback) and of course the chroma sampling being used. Be mindful if your target is compatibility tho consult with the x265 documentation if interested especially with the release of HEVC 3.0 (GCC 8.3.0) which brings a number of changes such as the addition of the tune animation.
To be noted all of this was done on a single Crucial 8GB DDR4 RAM which rarely hit 100% RAM output doing all of the above while encoding but I may add an additional 8/16 GB RAM in the future especially for any 1080p (and 4K) HEVC encodes, so you may want to increase your RAM if that's your target. Further note, if you watch streaming videos such as YouTube while waiting for your video to finish up be certain not to open so many browser tab. The RAM will increase closer to 100% if you've got just 8 GB, speaking from experience.
I purchased this through the OutletPC seller and they were able to help me out on my concerns and questions as a first time CPU buyer though it wasn't the best of help it got the point across regarding the handling of the CPU and the chances of being a root cause when troubleshooting hardware issues getting the PC to boot properly.
| Processor | 3.9 GHz ryzen_5_2600 |
|---|---|
| RAM | 16 GB DDR4 |
| Wireless Type | 802.11a |
