AMD Ryzen 5 3600X Review

Written by Antony Leather

August 13, 2019 | 13:00

Tags: #3rd-gen-ryzen #7nm #ryzen-5-3600x #x570 #zen-2

Companies: #amd

Manufacturer: AMD

UK price (as reviewed):£218.99 (inc. VAT)

US price (as reviewed): $249.99 (exc. tax)

While AMD is pushing cores well into double digits, we're pretty sure there's a bunch of people reading this with two or four cores sitting under the hood of their CPUs (busted! - ed.). That's part of the reason why we loved AMD's previous six-core Ryzen 5 CPUs: They offered huge benefits in multi-threaded performance, making them great all-rounders if you do things other than gaming with your PC. Of course, Intel still held a lead in games; while those AMD CPUs were hugely popular, for pure gaming rigs they were maybe not ideal, especially if you wanted maximum frame rates.


Model Cores/Threads Base Freq Boost Freq Total Cache TDP (Watts) Included cooler SEP (USD) Availability
Ryzen 9 3950X 16/32 3.5GHz 4.7GHz 72MB 105W Wraith Prism RGB $749 September
Ryzen 9 3900X 12/24 3.8GHz 4.6GHz 70MB 105W Wraith Prism RGB $499 July 7, 2019
Ryzen 7 3800X 8/16 3.9GHz 4.5GHz 36MB 105W Wraith Prism RGB $399 July 7, 2019
Ryzen 7 3700X 8/16 3.6GHz 4.4GHz 36MB 65W Wraith Prism RGB $329 July 7, 2019
Ryzen 5 3600X 6/12 3.8GHz 4.4GHz 35MB 95W Wraith Spire $249 July 7, 2019
Ryzen 5 3600 6/12 3.6GHz 4.2GHz 35MB 65W Wraith Stealth $199 July 7, 2019

With 3rd Gen Ryzen, though, as we've already seen, AMD has upped the ante and not only boosted its advantage in multi-threaded performance but also drastically increased its IPC and performance in lightly-threaded applications including games. Six cores now appears to be the minimum for a CPU in its new product stack, at least for now, with only the new APUs catering for fewer than this. However, both the Ryzen 5 3600 and the Ryzen 5 3600X we're looking at today could represent a sweet spot below £250, especially as the latter offers a boost frequency of 4.4GHz - the same as the Ryzen 7 3700X.

Dropping two cores also sees the total cache fall to 35MB, which is thanks to those two disabled cores on one CCX taking 1MB L2 cache with them - 512KB per core. The Ryzen 7 3700X and Ryzen 5 3600X have the same 32MB L3 cache and the same single-core boost frequency. However, the Ryzen 5 sports a 200MHz higher base frequency courtesy of a little extra leeway in TDP at 95W versus 65W. Indeed, we observed an all-core boost of around 4.1GHz compared to 4GHz with the Ryzen 7 3700X (using the same cooling, of course), which is good to see but clearly won't allow it to leapfrog the eight-core CPU in multi-threaded tests.

Amazingly, despite a launch barely six weeks ago, the Ryzen 5 3600X has already dropped in price from around £240 to £220 or so here in the UK, and there's a clear price war going on between it and the Core i5-9600K, which we have, of course, added to our graphs. The Intel CPU sits at the same price right now, but it's a price that has fallen consistently since AMD's 7th July launch, so it will be interesting to see how things pan out.


Discuss this in the forums
YouTube logo
MSI MPG Velox 100R Chassis Review

October 14 2021 | 15:04