AMD Ryzen 5 5500 6 Core 12 Thread AM4 Processor

With a TDP of 65 W, the AMD Ryzen 5 5500 consumes typical power levels for a modern PC. AMD's processor supports DDR4 memory with adual-channel interface. The highest officially supported memory speed is 3200 MHz, but with overclocking (and the right memory modules) you can go even higher. For communication with other components in the machine, AMD Ryzen 5 5500 uses a PCI-Express Gen 3 connection. This processor does not have integrated graphics, you will need a separate graphics card.

Hardware virtualization is available on the AMD Ryzen 5 5500, which greatly improves virtual machine performance. Programs using Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) can run on this processor, boosting performance for calculation-heavy applications. Besides AVX, AMD is including the newer AVX2 standard, too, but not AVX-512.

AMD Ryzen 5 5500 Processor Review

Today we're finally taking our first look at the Ryzen 5 5500. Surprisingly enough, this CPU was released about three months ago and it's the cheapest Ryzen 5000 series part you can have, so you'd think we'd be all over it, but for a few reasons we've missed that coverage.

The short version is that the R5 5500 was quietly released back in April and AMD didn't sample media in time for a day-one review, instead we got our sample a week after they hit shelves. At that point it was kind of old news, so we moved on to other things.

Recently though, after comparing the Ryzen 5 3600 and 5600 we were asked by many for a comparison with the 5500, given it can be snapped up for $140. That's a $40 discount from the Ryzen 5 5600, which isn't much, but then going purely by the name it doesn't sound like there's much difference between these two chips either... and that's what makes the 5500 a sneaky move by AMD.

The Ryzen 5 5500 and 5600 are vastly different products. Surely, they are both Zen 3 based, 6-core/12-thread processors, but they're based on different designs. Whereas the 5600 is a Vermeer model, the 5500 uses the APU design codenamed Cezanne. In short, the 5500 is a 5600G with the iGPU removed and that means when compared to the 5600 you're getting half the L3 cache at 16MB and only PCIe 3.0 support.

The L3 cache downgrade alone is a big one as we've seen it lead to underwhelmight gaming performance for the 5600G and 5700G when compared to full fledged Zen 3 parts. It sounds like many of you using older Ryzen 5 parts want to know if the 5500 is a worthwhile upgrade, or should you just opt for the 5600 or higher, so today we're going to find out.

For this one we've got a 21 game benchmark at 1080p and 1440p using both the Radeon RX 6950 XT and 6600 XT, with SAM enabled. The motherboard used for testing is the old MSI B350 Tomahawk using the latest BIOS revision based on the AGESA 1.2.0.7 microcode, which enables Resizable BAR along with support for Ryzen 5000 processors. Then we have 32GB of DDR4-3200 CL14 dual-rank dual-channel memory, and this same configuration was used for testing all Ryzen processors.