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.