AMD Ryzen 5 7600 Review

Conclusion

We said in our introduction about the importance of being honest with yourself about your usage, but it also behoves you to remember how our graphs work.

If you merely glanced at our graphs rather than study them, you might come away from today’s review with the impression that the Ryzen 5 7600 isn’t all that. It was nearly at the bottom until we hit the games where it absolutely romped home. Bear in mind that our graphs: 1) don’t include the old stuff because technology moves so quickly that anything more than about 3 or 4 years old will be way below. For example the Intel Core i9-10900K, a super CPU, matches the Ryzen 5 7600 in Cinebench, whilst the Ryzen 7 3800XT is behind it in the same test and the gaming behemoth of the last generation, the Intel Core i5-12400, is nowhere close. 2) We try and include most of the current stuff you can buy that’s also close in a price bracket to the chosen product. So at the other end of the scale the Ryzen 9 7950X or Intel Core i9-13900K would trounce this in rendering tasks, but aren’t remotely within budget of people who stretch their budget too far to reach the next model up. Lastly, or 3) many of our tests respond to massive core counts, something the Ryzen 5 7600, whilst still a Hexcore, doesn’t offer in the way the aforementioned pair of flagship models do.

Which returns us to the discussion about being honest with yourself. As you could see the Ryzen 5 7600is more than good enough to handle some decent light rendering tasks, or even heavy ones if you’re patient. Rendering of video and 3D models is unbelievably taxing and the law of diminishing returns is probably never highlighted better than in these tasks. To render at speeds you can really utilise required Pixar to build a 14000 sq.ft building housing 5000 or more CPUs. By that margin taking 30 minutes to blam out a 4K single frame on a CPU costing under 300 notes isn’t all that bad.

Let’s not kid ourselves though. Nobody is expecting a CPU in this sector of the market to let you produce 10 minute 3D short films, or edit your next 90 minute colour-graded blockbuster. The Ryzen 5 7600 is a CPU built for gaming and saving every spare penny to get a better GPU, and in this regard it plays an absolute blinder. In three of our four gaming benchmarks it topped the graph and, this bears highlighting, would have topped those graphs regardless of what we included. Stick in the Core i9 and Ryzen 9 CPUs and the Ryzen 5 7600 is still sitting at the top. The only one it didn’t is Watch Dogs: Legion, and if our GPU testing is anything to go by that particular title has all the consistency of cottage cheese.

All of which means that, at the time of writing, if you want a gaming processor the Ryzen 5 7600 is the one to buy, almost regardless of budget. Naturally if you spend 50% of your time editing videos for YT or whatever then look elsewhere, but be honest with yourself. Particularly as AMD have been ultra-aggressive with the pricing of the Ryzen 5 7600. £230 is really low for a 6/12 CPU of this capability. If you’re either browsing or gaming, why spend more? It’s enough to win the AMD Ryzen 5 7600 our OC3D Gamers Choice and Value For Money Awards.

  

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