Following the launch of Ryzen 7, AMD has announced the second tier of its desktop CPU lineup, the Ryzen 5. Unlike the Ryzen 7, which targets the high-end of desktop computing, the Ryzen 5 is aimed at the mid-range and will compete with the more affordable Intel Core i5 series.

The current lineup includes four SKUs, starting with Ryzen 5 1600X at the top, followed by Ryzen 5 1600, Ryzen 5 1500X, and then the Ryzen 5 1400 at the very bottom.

The Ryzen 5 1600X is a 6-core part with 12 threads, 3.6GHz base clock speed and 4.0GHz boost clock speed and 100MHz XFR boost with certain coolers, 16MB L3 cache, 95W TDP and a pricetag of $249.

Ryzen 5 1600 has the same core count but 3.2GHz base clock and 3.6GHz boost clock and is a 65W TDP part, which is priced at $219. It will come with AMD's new Wraith Spire cooler.

Ryzen 5 1500X has 4 cores and 8 threads with 3.5GHz base clock and 3.7GHz boost clock with 200MHz XFR boost and 65W TDP. It is priced at $189 and will be available with the Wraith Spire cooler.

Lastly, there is the Ryzen 5 1400, which has the same core and thread count as the 1500X with 3.2GHz base clock and 3.4GHz boost clock with 50MHz XFR, 8MB L3 cache, and 65W TDP. It costs $169 and comes with the Wraith Stealth cooler.

All four parts feature an unlocked multiplier for overclocking.

Like the Ryzen 7, AMD is marketing the Ryzen 5 for its core count and multithreaded performance. According to AMD's testing, the 1600X posted 69% higher score in Cinebench in multithreaded benchmark compared to the Core i5-7600K. Unlike the AMD parts, all the Core i5 processors have 4 physical cores without Hyper-Threading, which affects their multithreaded performance. However, as we saw with Ryzen 7, it is likely that Intel will still beat AMD when it comes to single-threaded performance. As we have seen time and again with games and most other applications, single-threaded performance is more important, with multi-threaded performance only being relevant to things such as video editing or if you have other things running in the background during gaming, such as video streaming.

The Ryzen 5 is based on the same AMD AM4 platform as Ryzen 7 with same basic feature support. None of the parts have an integrated GPU so a dedicated GPU is a must, which shouldn't be an issue for those interested in gaming. All the parts will go on sale on April 11.

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