It took two Chinese Zen-based Hygon 8C/16T CPUs to beat a real AMD Ryzen 5 5600X

Back in 2016, even before it had released its Zen CPUs into the wild, AMD entered an IP licensing agreement with a Chinese company called THATIC where it was lending Zen CPU IP to this Chinese firm to help in the manufacturing of Zen-based Chinese CPUs.

Such a processor called the Dhyana C86 3185 was tested by a Chinese YouTuber called EJ Hardware against AMD's Ryzen 5 5600X. In fact, a pair of these CPUs in a dual-socket configuration was pitted against the 5600X to see how well it performs against a real Zen 3 processor.

The C86 3185 is a processor which is based on the first-gen Ryzen 7 packing 8 cores 16 threads (8C/16T), though it clocks much lower than any of the three Ryzen 7 SKUs (1800X, 1700X, and 1700).

The processors themselves, alongside the accompanying parts like motherboards, coolers (image below) are made by a firm called Hygon. According to AnandTech,

Hygon works with HMC to add co-design elements and packaging, then selling the silicon to China.

Now, moving into the benchmarks run, the Ryzen 5 5600X is easily able to beat the Hygon Dhyana C86 3185 in single-threaded workloads, due to the higher clocks as well as higher instructions per cycle (IPC) in Zen 3.

However, the dual 8C/16T Hygon chip is too much to handle for the 6C/12T 5600X when multi-threading comes into play. Also, thanks to the dual-socket design, the Hygon CPUs were running quad-channel DDR4-1,866 memory. The Cinebench results below demonstrate this well.

Up next, we have two real-world benchmarks, in the form of the Blender BMW benchmark and X264 FHD benchmark. In both instances, the dual C86 3185 wins.

Some gaming tests were also run using an RTX 3080 Ti, but the difference isn't significant enough to call a winner.

Source and images: 二斤自制 EJ Hardware (YouTube)