Is it worth paying more money to get AMD’s 8 core Ryzen 7 5800H, or are you going to be
just fine with the cheaper 6 core Ryzen 5 5600H? I’ve compared both laptop processors to find out!
Here are the differences in specs between these two processors.
The main difference is of course in the core counts,
the Ryzen 7 chip has 2 extra cores or 33% more. The 5800H also has slightly more L2
cache and a higher boost clock speed, though the base clock on the 5600H was 100MHz higher.
For this comparison I’m using the HP Omen 15, so the exact same chassis for both laptops.
I’ve also tested using the exact same physical kit of memory in both for a fair comparison,
32 gigs of DDR4-3200 CL22 dual rank memory running in dual channel.
Both laptops have the exact same cooling solution and battery inside,
so we’re also able to fairly compare things like thermals and battery life.
I’ve tested both laptops with both processors running at stock, so no power limit,
and with both processors manually limited to a 45 watt TDP, so let’s get into the testing.
Here’s how hot the processors in both laptops get with Blender running,
a multi threaded processor intensive workload. I’ve got the results up the
top with both laptops just running at stock, so no power limits,
then below with both manually limited to 45 watts by using the Ryzen Controller software.
At stock both laptops were reaching thermal throttle limits in this CPU intensive test,
though it does run for well over 10 minutes so it’s also one of the heaviest tests I’ve run.
With both capped at 45 watts the 8 core 5800H was actually quite a bit cooler than the 6 core 5600H.
The higher temperature is tied to the higher clock speeds being reached.
With both limited to a 45 watt TDP the 6 core 5600H was around 500MHz higher than
the 8 core 5800H when averaging all cores. With no power limits the gap closes though,
but as we saw earlier both were reaching thermal limits of 95 degrees Celsius there.
With the 45 watt TDP set, well, both processors were running at 45 watts as
expected. I chose to also test this because many laptops limit the TDP to 45 watts,
plus it lets us compare performance without temperature limits. With no limits in place,
so default out of the box behavior for the HP Omen 15, the 5800H was able to use more
power than the 5600H, despite running at lower clock speeds. More cores just need more power.
The results are a little different when measuring the total system power draw from the wall.
This includes everything, even screen and keyboard lighting, so I was sure to run both laptops the
same to be as comparable as possible. The 5800H laptop was pulling a few more watts from the wall,
even when both had the same 45 watt TDP, but it’s only a small difference.
Here’s how fast the Blender benchmark was actually completed, lower times are faster
here. As a multithreaded test, we’re of course expecting the Ryzen 7 5800H to be faster, and it
is. With both limited to a 45 watt TDP, the 5800H was performing the longer classroom test about 18%
faster, but then with neither processor subject to power limit and just running at stock the
5800H was now about 25% faster. A decent improvement, but considering it also has 33%
more cores the performance in this test clearly isn’t perfectly scaling with the additional cores.
Perhaps the gap would be closer to that if thermals weren’t a limitation in the omen 15.
It’s a similar deal in Cinebench R23 for the multicore score. AMD’s 5800H was scoring 27%
higher than the 5600H with no power limits, but then with both running at the same 45 watt TDP
the 5800H was just 12% higher. The single core score was 6% higher on the 5800H regardless
of power limit, as thermal and power limits shouldn’t get triggered by a single core test.
A 6% boost makes sense when considering the 5800H has a 5% higher max boost clock.
That said, the results in Geekbench were a little strange. For some reason the 5800H
was consistently slightly lower in the single core score when there was no power limit. I’m
not exactly sure why as this test runs a lot of different workloads to generate its score, but it
was consistent. Otherwise the multicore score had basically the same improvement as Cinebench just
before it at 45 watts, with the 5800H almost 13% higher than the 5600H, but then with no
limits the 5800H is now 18% higher, so still not quite living up to the 33% higher core count.
Handbrake was used to convert a 4K h.264 video file that I shot to 1080p h.265.
The differences here were on the lower side out of the multithreaded tests.
The 5800H wasn’t even 8% faster than the 5600H with both CPUs power limited to the
same 45 watt TDP. With no limits though it was able to widen the gap to a 13%
lead, but this was still a below average result out of the multithreaded applications tested.
The results in Adobe Photoshop are weird, and potentially wrong somehow, I’m just not
sure how. The 5600H was consistently scoring higher and I double checked all these results.
Generally this test depends on CPU single threaded performance,
so I’d expect the 5800H to do better, but it was consistently a little behind regardless of
the power limit. Both laptops have the same Windows updates, same version of Photoshop,
same Radeon drivers, and the Nvidia graphics were disabled, but these were my results.
V-Ray uses the processor to render out a scene. As was the case with many of the
other multithreaded tests, the 5800H had an above average lead over the 5600H here. The
5800H was scoring 17% higher with the 45 watt power limit, but 27% higher with no power limit.
The Corona benchmark is another multithreaded rendering workload,
but in this one the 5800H had some of the biggest differences out of all applications tested.
At 45 watts it was 20% faster than the 5600H, the biggest difference while power limited,
and then with no limit the 5800H was completing the task 28% faster,
the 2nd biggest difference out of all applications tested with no power limit.
Linux Kernel compilation is another multithreaded workload, and lower times are better here.
Unlike all other tests which were run in Windows 10, this one was done in Ubuntu
21. With the 45 watt limit in place the 5800H was completing the task just 15%
faster, and only a little further ahead at 18% faster with no power limit.
Microsoft Excel had even smaller differences,
the 5800H was only a little ahead with a 6 to 7% faster completion time when compared to the 5600H.
7-Zip decompression had the biggest difference
between the two processors with no power limit with the 5800H doing 29%
better than the 5600H, though the difference in compression was smaller at 18%.
Power limits don’t seem to affect AES encryption or decryption, but like Photoshop,
this was another odd result where the 5600H was slightly ahead,
granted the difference is extremely small here in any case.
These are the differences when looking at all of the applications just tested with the lower
45 watt TDP limit in place. In most applications, the higher tier Ryzen 7 5800H was doing better, as
you’d expect, it’s got more cores, more cache and higher clock speed. The AES tests and Photoshop
were slightly ahead on the 5600H, but they’re strange outliers and the difference is only small.
In CPU only workloads such as these tasks, laptops are often able to run much higher than 45 watts,
though it of course depends on the specific machine and thermal headroom. Without power
limits in place, the 5800H was now further ahead of the 5600H in most of these tests,
especially the multithreaded tasks as its extra cores are better utilized.
Both laptops have the same 70.9Wh battery inside,
and I found that the Ryzen 5 5600H was lasting about 8% longer in my YouTube playback test.
Both laptops had the screen brightness set to 50% and keyboard lighting off,
and this test would run with only the integrated graphics from the processor in use.
I’ve also compared Cinebench on wall power and battery power to see how much
performance is lost when running HP’s Omen 15 on battery. The single core scores hardly change,
but the 5800H loses more performance compared to the 5600H when running off of the battery
power. When both laptops are on wall power the 5800H is reaching a 27% higher multicore score,
but this lowers to a 19% lead with both on battery.
Alright, so the 5800H clearly performs better,
but what’s the price difference and is it worth extra cost?
I can’t currently find HP’s Omen 15 on the website, out of stock perhaps,
but the Omen 16 with 6600M graphics is listed with both processor options,
and it looks like the Ryzen 7 5800H option is $140 USD more, or in this example about 10% more money.
As to whether or not that’s worth it, well it’ll depend on the workloads you plan on running. If
time is money and you plan on keeping your device for a few years then I’d probably just pay the
extra and get the Ryzen 7. Especially if you’re planning on running multithreaded workloads.
Now that said, although the 5800H is better, the difference wasn’t quite as big as I was
expecting compared to the 5600H. Despite having two fewer CPU cores the 5600H still does pretty
well. But what about gaming? Unfortunately I had both of these laptops with two different GPUs,
the RTX 3060 for my 5600H and RTX 3070 for the 5800H, so I can’t use these to
fairly compare gaming, but based on what we saw in this video here when comparing
6 and 8 core Intel laptops there’s no real major differences when it comes to gaming,
and I suspect that that would hold true with the Ryzen models as well.
The fact is, 6 fast cores is still plenty for pretty much all games today,
so at the end of the day if gaming is your priority I would think that the 5600H
would be perfectly adequate. The 5800H will be better, but yeah don’t expect big gains there,
at least compared to most of the tests shown in this video.
Check out these videos next if you want to see how well AMD’s 6 and 8
core laptop processors compare against Intel’s options. Make sure you’re subscribed for future
laptop comparisons like this one, there are a lot more on the way, and come and
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