The AMD Ryzen 5 series will be released on April 11 but an enterprising individual was able to simulate and test the unreleased CPUs in several games like "Far Cry Primal," "Battlefield 1," and "Ghost Recon: Wildlands." Meanwhile, weeks before the official launch date, European resellers have inadvertently sold the Ryzen 5 CPUs with some buyers reportedly posting photos of their newly acquired chips with the promise of benchmarks soon after.

Just last week, AMD announced its four new mainstream processors starting from the top, the Ryzen 5 1600X with 6 cores/12 threads, a base clock of 3.6GHz and boost of 4GHz retailing at $249. This is followed by the Ryzen 5 1600 with 6 cores/12 threads, 3.2GHz base clock and 3.6GHz boost at $219 then comes the Ryzen 5 1500X with 4 cores/8threads, 3.5GHz base clock and 3.7GHz boost at $189. The lowest in the series is the Ryzen 5 1400 with 4 cores/8threads, 3.2GHz base clock and 3.4GHz boost for only $169. These were then simulated and tested by disabling the cores in the CCX modules in the Ryzen 7 CPUs to mimic the configurations of the Ryzen 5, Tech Spot reported.

The test pitted the AMD Ryzen 5 processors against the Intel Core i3, i5 and i7 models using NVIDIA GPUs like the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, GTX 1070 and GTX 1060. First stop is in "Far Cry Primal," a game which is believed to have design codes not working well with the Zen architecture. As expected, the Ryzen 5 CPUs were not even on par with Intel's Core i3 with GTX 1080 Ti onboard but managed to have better results when paired with the GTX 1070. Further down with GTX 1060, the AMD and Intel CPUs were evenly matched. Incidentally, disabling the Simultaneous Multithreading in Ryzen boosted its performance by as much as 15 percent.

In "Mafia III" where AMD can leverage on its hyperthreading, the Ryzen 5 1500X was at par with the higher clocked 7600K with GTX 1080 Ti. The AMD CPUs even posted better results using the GTX 1070 GPU with the 1600X outgunning 7700K which was clocked at 4.8GHz while the 1500X matched the 7600K though it is clocked higher by 17 percent. The Same performance was seen in all CPUs with GTX 1060. Meanwhile, all AMD Ryzen CPUs maxed out in the GPU-intensive "For Honor" using the NVIDIA graphics cards.

The AMD Ryzen 5 also delivered consistent performance in the CPU-intensive "F1 2016" with a standout Ryzen 5 1500X at 4GHz at par with 7600K at 4.8GHz in using both GTX 1080 Ti and GTX 1070. All Ryzen CPUs also gave a smoother performance in "Battlefield 1" even with just 4 cores enabled with GTX 1080 Ti onboard with the margin narrowing with GTX 1070 though Ryzen still has better minimum rates as compared to 7600K. All CPUs including Intel even out with 1060, which is pretty much the same scenario in "Ghost Recon: Wildlands" with only the Core i3-7350k lagging behind. The Ryzen CPUs in the last game produced consistent performance in 4, 6 or 8 cores with GTX 1080 Ti and with margin again narrowing when pitted against the Core i3, i5 and i7 models using GTX 1070.

Meanwhile, wccftech reported that some European resellers were already selling the AMD Ryzen 5 CPUs weeks ahead of launch. Buyers have already posted their new purchases and will be benchmarking them soon. This may be advantageous to PC gamers having first a look of what the new mainstream processors can do before they hit the market.