[Hardware] AMD Zen 3 Ryzen 5000 Price, Benchmarks, Specs and Release Date

[Angel of Death]

With the Ryzen 5000 series, it's fair to say that AMD has finally, and fully, eclipsed Intel's performance dominance in desktop PCs. AMD's Zen 3 architecture has landed in the new Ryzen 5000 series, breaking the 5GHz barrier with a newer version of AMD's most successful architecture to date. We've got plenty of gaming and application benchmarks, power measurements, and thermal testing here in this article to serve as a guide to the performance you can expect from AMD's most dominant series of processors in more than a decade. We also have pricing guides and links to tips on where to find the chips at retail, and you can see how the Ryzen 5000 chips rank compared to Intel's chips in our CPU Benchmark Hierarchy.The desktop PC was first on AMD's Zen 3 chopping block, but the new microarchitecture will eventually power AMD's full lineup of next-gen processors, including the Ryzen 5000 "Vermeer" desktop processors that have taken over our list of Best CPUs, and the EPYC Milan data center processors. AMD has also now announced its new Ryzen 5000 Mobile series, which is coming to retail soon in a host of new laptops.The first four Ryzen 5000 series desktop PC models stretch from the $299 Ryzen 5 5600X up to the $799 Ryzen 9 5950X. Barring shortages, the CPUs are on shelves now and represent a massive shift in the AMD vs Intel CPU wars. AMD has finally eclipsed Intel's desktop PC processors in every single metric that matters, like single- and multi-threaded workloads, productivity applications, and 1080p gaming performance, all by surprising margins.AMD's Zen 3 features a ground-up rethinking of the microarchitecture that finally allows it to take the 1080p gaming performance lead from Intel. Paired with a 19% boost to instructions per cycle (IPC) throughput and peak rated boost speeds of up to 4.9 GHz, Zen 3 is the magic 7nm bullet that finally upsets Intel from its position at the top of our CPU gaming benchmarks. In fact, given what we've seen so far, it looks like AMD could soon enjoy a dominating position in the desktop PC market unlike anything we've seen since the Athlon 64 days.Intel is stuck with its Comet Lake CPUs until next month to try to fend off the Ryzen 5000 series when Rocket Lake arrives in Q1 2021. Intel has finally dropped the details on Rocket Lake, revealing that it comes with a backported Cypress Cove microarchitecture that also delivers a 19% IPC gain, just like Zen 3, which might help even the score against the Ryzen 5000 processors in some areas - but definitely not all. Rocket Lake tops out at eight cores, and it's not coming to market until March while Zen 3 is on shelves now.Here's the Zen 3 Ryzen 5000 series processors that AMD has launched thus far, but we expect more to come to market soon: