AMD Ryzen 5 1600 and 1600X CPUs Found With 8 Cores

Free stuff is nice to have, but often it comes with some sort of drawback. For example, you get some free SWAG at an event, but end up with lots of marketing e-mails. Or you get some free beer, but it’s not your favorite kind. Well, for some lucky Ryzen 5 CPU buyers, they got a few free cores.

Members of a Korean forum, cooln.kr, recently reported that their Ryzen 5 1600 and 1600X CPUs actually had eight working cores, and 16 threads, instead of the expected six cores with 12 threads. The CPUs all had base clocks of 3.6Ghz and Turbo clocks of 4.0Ghz, in effect making them an 1800X.

As far as performance goes, these anomalous Ryzen 5 CPUs performed just like the higher-priced Ryzen 7 1800X.

 As to why these CPUs are being shipped out with extra cores and threads is still a mystery, but it isn’t the first time we have seen extra cores, shaders, or some other performance or feature gain show up unexpectedly in a product. Obviously, we wouldn’t recommend going out and buying a Ryzen 5 1600 or 1600X and expecting to get extra cores and threads, but the fact that some buyers have lucked out is kind of exciting.