AMD Ryzen 5 3600 Review

AMD Ryzen 5 3600 Review

Introduction

When we recently reviewed the PC Specialist Magma L1 system we were impressed by the performance of the middle model in the latest AMD Ryzen 3rd Generation CPUs, the Ryzen 5 3600.

We’ve already looked at the Ryzen 5 3600X CPU, but the vanilla Ryzen 5 3600 is a little cheaper without too many obvious drawbacks. Naturally having seen how it performs on a B450 motherboard with some great value part choices, we wondered how it would stack up if you gave it the full berries, with a X570 motherboard, RTX 2080 Ti GPU and the whole shebang.

It might be easy to consider that you’re just going to be using your system for gaming and nothing more, thus a quad core is more than plenty, but with so many background processes running and the opportunity to stream your gaming exploits on the various platforms such as Twitch, some extra cores and thus threads never hurt, and can also bring higher gaming performance in titles that rely more upon the CPU to do the heavy lifting than the graphics card. Total War: Three Kingdoms for example.

So find a comfortable spot, check your bank balance, and let’s find out how the Ryzen 5 3600 compares to the other Intel and AMD processors around, and if its sub £200 price tag and minor core speed drop over the X version makes it the best pound for pound processor on the market.

Technical Specifications

Like its Ryzen 5 3600X brother, the vanilla Ryzen 5 3600 is a hex core processor with hyperthreading and a boost clock of just over 4 GHz. With 32MB of L3 cache, 3MB of L2 cache and the all-important PCI Express 4.0 built in, it promises to deliver a hefty amount of performance for a small investment.

Core Count 6
Thread Count 12
Base Clock 3.6 GHz
Boost Clock Up to 4.2 GHz
L1 Cache 384 KB
L2 Cache 3 MB
L3 Cache 32 MB
Unlocked Yes
CMOS TSMC 7nm FinFET
Package AM4
PCI Express PCIe 4.0 x16
TDP 65W
Max Temperature 95°C