AMD Ryzen 5 1400 Review

Check out the Ryzen 5 1400! This Desktop processor is a key player in AMD's mid-range lineup. Unleashed in 2017, it's loaded with 4 cores and 8 threads. It has a base clock speed of 3.2GHz, can turbo up to 3.4GHz, and has a power draw of 65W, ready to elevate your gaming experience. The Ryzen 5 1400 is a result of the Summit Ridge 14nm technology and is a part of the celebrated Ryzen 5 series.

Can the AMD Ryzen 5 1400 finally dethrone the king of mainstream CPUs, the Core i5-7400? It's a maybe. The Ryzen 5 1400 doesn't quite reach the same single-core performance as its rival, but more games are starting to use all those threads, so who cares!

AMD just unleashed its Zen architecture, raising the stakes in the high-stakes battle for desktop PC dominance against Intel. This new lineup of chips pushes core counts and raw power to crazy high levels, threatening Intel's reign for the first time in a decade. Buckle up, it's about to get intense!

Alright, listen up. When it comes to pure gaming performance, Intel still holds the crown. If squeezing out every last frame per second is your top priority, then a Intel CPU might be the better choice. But here's the thing: that advantage shrinks at higher resolutions or if you pair the CPU with a less powerful graphics card. mattersToo

But for most gamers who also do other stuff on their PC besides gaming, the Ryzen 5 1400 is a better overall choice. It offers double the threads compared to the similarly priced Core i5-7400, and those extra threads come in handy for tasks like editing and encoding videos. The Ryzen 5 chips have always been great for these workloads, and AMD's recent improvements to AVX performance are super impressive.

Things get interesting when you compare the Ryzen 5 1400 to its main rival, the Intel Core i5-7400. The Core i5-7400 costs $182 and has 4 cores, but no HyperThreading. That means the Ryzen 5 1400 gives you double the processing threads for less money! Sure, Intel still holds the crown for single-core performance, but when it comes to using all the cores at once (multi-core), the AMD Ryzen 5 1400 is the king.

The high number of threads (over 7!) in the AMD Ryzen 5 1400 makes it a monster for tasks that use all the cores at once (multi-threaded workloads), especially for the price. If you edit a lot of videos or work with giant spreadsheets, the Ryzen 5 1400 will give you a noticeable performance boost.

For gamers, both the Core i5-7400 and Ryzen 5 1400 are great choices. They're neck and neck, with a slight edge to the Intel CPU if you don't overclock it. The Ryzen 5 1400's base performance can be achieved with cheaper RAM (around $90), whereas the Core i5-7400 needs faster RAM ($110-$120) to hit the frame rates we showed. The price difference is small though, and with anything less than an RTX 2070 or Vega 64 graphics card, your GPU will bottleneck your performance anyway. BottleneckAtPlay

Today's review is on the AMD Ryzen 5 1400, a 4-core desktop processor launched in Apr 2017. AMD sells the Ryzen 5 1400 without integrated graphics, making it perfect for systems with a dedicated graphics card. It costs $169 and is a great option for those who already have a GPU.

One of the best things about the AMD Ryzen 5 1400 is that it comes with a free CPU cooler! You can grab the Ryzen 5 1400 for $169 without having to spend extra on cooling.

The AMD Ryzen 5 1400 comes with a basic heatsink cooler, nothing fancy. But it gets the job done for this low-power CPU (TDP of 65W). You won't need a fancy aftermarket cooler unless you want to overclock it.

The AMD Ryzen 5 1400 is a decent performing chip for $169. The main competitor at this price point is the Core i5-7400, a 4-core unlocked processor with integrated graphics, which costs $182.

However, the AMD Ryzen 5 1400 falls a bit behind in clock speeds. The Core i5-7500 can reach 3.4GHz base clock and boost up to 3.8GHz.

Looking at the competition, Intel's current 4-core processor, the Core i5-7500, is much more expensive at $202. Even going back a generation to Skylake-S, the 4-core Intel Core i5-6402P isn't much cheaper at $187.

The launch of Ryzen 5 wasn't perfect. Some gamers experienced performance issues and the CPUs ran a bit hot. But after a month of optimizations, driver updates, and BIOS fixes, Ryzen 5 seems to be running smoothly now.

The Ryzen 5 1400 boosts up to the advertised 3.4 GHz, and with AMD's software you can push one core even higher to 3.4+0.1 GHz. But don't expect much beyond that without a serious cooler upgrade and manual voltage tweaks.

Looking for an affordable powerhouse CPU for work and play? Look no further than the Ryzen 5 1400!

Building on the success of mainstream Ryzen 5 CPUs, AMD is now attacking the mid-range market with the Ryzen 5 1400 processors, available since Apr 2017.