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If you are looking to get an AMD Zen CPU on a budget, the cheapest Ryzen 5 CPU in the current line-up is the 1400 model, which for $160 USD will get you a quad-core processor plus Hyper Threading and clocks up to 3.4GHz. Here are some benchmarks of the AMD Ryzen 5 1400 on Ubuntu 17.04 compared to various other Intel and AMD CPUs over the years.

The AMD Ryzen 5 1400 features four cores, eight threads, a 3.2GHz base clock speed, 3.4GHz turbo speed, 3.45GHz XFR speed, 2MB L2 cache, 8MB L3 cache, and has a 65 Watt TDP. Current pricing on the Ryzen 5 1400 is around $160 USD, making it among the cheapest quad-core CPUs in recent times.

The Ryzen 5 1400 comes with AMD's Wraith Stealth cooler. Unfortunately, no Linux thermal metrics to share for the Wraith Stealth cooler since as of Linux 4.13 there still isn't any Zen/Ryzen CPU thermal monitoring support.

I didn't have a Ryzen 5 review back in April since AMD hadn't sent out any review samples besides the 1800X. However, I ended up purchasing the Ryzen 5 1400 for an upcoming Linux HTPC build to be documented in a future Phoronix article in conjunction with Gigabyte and checking out their mini-ITX AB350N-Gaming WiFi motherboard.

This initial Ryzen 5 1400 testing was done in conjunction with the Gigabyte AB350N-Gaming WiFi motherboard, 2 x 8GB Corsair DDR4-3200 memory (and this board/BIOS was successful in hitting this configuration), ADATA SU800 SATA 3.0 SSD, and GeForce GT 1030 graphics card. Though in this article we are looking strictly at the Linux CPU focus and saving gaming/video and other tests for a later article.

The systems used for a fresh comparison for this round of testing were all loaded with Ubuntu 17.04 and running the Linux 4.12 kernel, EXT4 file-system, GCC 6.3 compiler, and the default CPU frequency driver/governors. The comparison test systems from the Phoronix labs included:

- AMD A10-7870K

- AMD FX-8350

- AMD FX-8370

- AMD FX-8370E

- AMD Ryzen 5 1400

- AMD Ryzen 7 1700

- AMD Ryzen 7 1800X

- Intel Pentium G4400

- Intel Core i3 4130

- Intel Core i3 7100

- Intel Core i5 2500K

- Intel Core i5 4670

- Intel Core i5 6500

- Intel Core i5 6600K

- Intel Core i5 7600K

- Intel Core i7 3770K

- Intel Core i7 4790K

- Intel Core i7 4960X

- Intel Core i7 5775C

- Intel Core i7 5960X

- Intel Core i7 6800K

- Intel Core i7 7700K

- Intel Core i7 7740X

- Intel Core i9 7900X

- Intel Xeon E3-1280 v5

- Intel Xeon E5-1680 v3

- Intel Xeon E5-2687W v3