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Office & Productivity
Adobe Creative Cloud
The stock Ryzen 5 2600X trails most of AMD's first-gen Ryzen CPUs, notably lagging behind the previous-gen Ryzen 5 1600X. We reran this benchmark several times to verify its results, and the outcome is repeatable. But given the performance observed in other tests, PCMark's Creative Cloud component may be an outlier.
Although we didn't see much performance variation from the patches in our game testing, that changes drastically in our Adobe Creative Cloud suite. Every Intel processor's overall score takes a significant haircut (the Core i7-8700K drops ~9%, while the Core i5-8400 drops ~10%).
Web Browser
The Krakken suite tests JavaScript performance using several workloads, including audio, imaging, and cryptography.
AMD's processors typically lag Intel's in Web browser benchmarks due to their lower per-core performance. The Ryzen 5 2600X is competitive with Intel's Core i5-8400 in this test. But as we noted in our Ryzen 7 2700X review, overclocking actually results in lower scores during lightly-threaded tasks. That's a bit more surprising in this case because, as we pointed out on the first page, Ryzen 5 2600X sustains up to 4.2 GHz on a single core, which is the same frequency as our all-core overclock. XFR2 contributes an extra boost during sporadic workloads though, and that's likely what we're seeing here.
The MotionMark benchmarks, which emphasize graphics performance (rather than JavaScript), are also sensitive to CPU clock rates. Ryzen 5 2600X isn't as competitive compared to the Intel models, reminding us that AMD still lags what it comes to IPC throughput.
Again, we see performance regressions from Intel's processors in these workloads, which we measured with a Spectre-patched version of Firefox.
Productivity
The application start-up metric measures load time snappiness in word processors, GIMP, and Web browsers under warm- and cold-start conditions. Other platform-level considerations affect this test as well, including the storage subsystem. Initially, we thought that'd be bad news for Intel's CPUs. After all, the security mitigations have an intense impact on I/O operations. Surprisingly, though, we actually recorded higher results from the Intel-based platforms. Meanwhile, the Ryzen 5 2600X beats AMD's first-gen Ryzen CPUs, but trails the Core i5-8400.
Our video conferencing workload measures performance in single- and multi-user applications that utilize the Windows Media Foundation for playback and encoding. It also performs facial detection to model real-world usage. Ryzen processors perform well in this test, joining an overclocked Core i7-8700K at the top of the chart. At stock settings, the Ryzen 5 2600X handily dispatches Intel's Core i5-8400.
The photo editing benchmark measures performance with Futuremark's binaries using the ImageMagick library. Common photo processing workloads also tend to be parallelized, so Ryzen 7 2700X naturally takes a lead. The Ryzen 5 2600X performs well given its price point. And the Intel CPUs all take a hit after we get them patched.
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