AMD's new Ryzen 5 5500F is turning out to be more than just a rebadge of the standard Ryzen 5 5500 in gaming. New benchmarks from YouTuber RandomGaminginHD show the $99 chip pulling ahead of its non-F sibling by up to 16% in CPU-bound titles, even though both processors share the same core count and land at roughly the same price. The testing paired both chips with an RX 9060 XT 16 GB graphics card and ran through seven games at 1080p.

Battlefield 6 showed the biggest gap at 16% in favor of the new 5500F, followed by Cyberpunk 2077 at 11%, GTA V: Enhanced at 9%, and Counter-Strike 2 at 8%. Titles that leaned more on the GPU, like Crimson Desert and Red Dead Redemption 2, saw that gap shrink to single digits or vanish once the RX 9060 XT became the bottleneck instead of the CPU. Of course, these are early numbers from one single test system, so it's important to wait for further testing to form a concrete verdict either way.

The 5500F uses AMD's "Vermeer" chiplet design with a 200 MHz higher boost clock plus PCIe 4.0 support, while the regular 5500 runs on the monolithic "Cezanne" die capped at PCIe 3.0. AMD launched the 5500 F as a new entry-level pick for the AM4 platform.