Ryzen 5 3600: Learn all about the third generation AMD processor. What gen is ryzen 5 3600

Testing with 7-zip we can see that the R5 3600 beats the 2700X. The compression efficiency is great, offering 14% more efficiency than the 8700K. It lagged behind the eight-core Ryzen processors in the decompression test, but was still 16% faster than the 8700K.

Ryzen 5 3600: Learn all about the third generation AMD processor

The Ryzen 5 3600 is the third generation processor from AMD, which is distinguished by its cost-effectiveness. At around $ 189.99, the processor promises to be faster than Intel’s Core i7 8700K, which costs almost twice. With a Hexa core, the chip also has speeds of up to 4.2 GHz, allowing overclocking for higher performance.

Check out more about the Ryzen processor below to see if it’s a good choice for you. It is worth mentioning that the component is compatible with AM4 chipsets, the same standard used in 2nd generation AMD processors, which should make the upgrade easier.

AMD Ryzen 5 3600 Specification

The Ryzen 5 3600 is a processor with 6 cores and 12 threads, offering a base clock of 3.6 GHz and speeds up to 4.2 GHz via turbo. Like other third-generation chips in the line, the model is manufactured in a 7nm manufacturing process, which is expected to mean higher component performance.

Ryzen has 32MB of L3 cache and is already compatible with PCIe 4.0 interfaces. In addition, it adopts AMD’s AM4 socket, the universal standard among all Ryzen and APU processors of the brand. When it comes to RAM, the Ryzen 5 3600 provides support for up to two DDR4 3200 MHz channels.

The Ryzen 5 3600 was solid in the Rage 2, averaging 160fps, meaning it wasn’t much slower than the 9600K. Moreover, the R5 3600 was fast enough to find the limitations of the RTX 2080 Ti at 1440p, though that was true of nearly all of the CPUs we tested.

AMD Ryzen 5 3600 Review In 2022

Includes built-in coolers, Hyper-Threading (AMD calls it SMT), and unlocked multipliers that allow for simple overclocking

all of which are specifications that Intel either ignores or disables some of its chips in the name of segmentation.

Instead of stealing extra dollars from its consumers, AMD offers the same basic features in the form of the six-core, 12-thread Ryzen 5 3600 for $ 199, which it offers alongside its full-fledged counterpart, the Ryzen 5 3600X for $ 249.

In short, the Ryzen 5 3600 shares the same six-core, 12-thread design, 32MB L3 cache, and access to 24 PCIe 4.0 lanes. The only difference is the return to the 65W Wraith Stealth cooling, while the 3600X is equipped with the more efficient 95W Wraith Spire cooler.

This follows the same AMD pattern we saw in the not-so-distant past, with overclocking capabilities that make non-X models a better value for gamers and editors than the more expensive X-series models.

However, if you’re hunting for the best FPS you can get from a six-core CPU, be aware that the Ryzen 5 3600 chips may not hit the peak overclocking speeds of the 3600X models.

In any case, the great combination of features and overclocking capabilities makes the Ryzen 5 3600 the obvious choice for enthusiasts looking for a mid-range processor at a great price.

Let’s Dig Deeper into the Ryzen 5 3600 Now

Features

• Like other Ryzen 3000 chips, the six-core, 12-thread Ryzen 5 3600 ships with a 7nm compute die (with two physical cores off) coupled with a 12nm I / O die.
• These two components are synchronized in one package which is housed in a 65W TDP chassis, making it physically identical to the Ryzen 5 3600X 95W. The Ryzen 5 3600 has clock rates slightly lower than 3600X, with a base frequency of 3.6 GHz and Precision Boost 2 4.2 GHz, which is a difference of 200 MHz in both measurements.
• The 4.2GHz boost rate of the 3600 is less than the $ 192.4GHz Core i5-9500 boost, however its 3.6GHz base frequency is equivalent to a 600MHz advantage, coupled with a drastic improvement in AMD’s per-cycle instruction throughput (IPC) will result in higher performance in heavy games and applications.
• Coming face to face with the $ 182 Core i5-9400F, the 3600 has an 800MHz advantage and a 100MHz boost.
• The Ryzen 5 3600 comes with an integrated 65W Wraith Stealth cooler, and while both the Core i5-9500 and -9400F come with factory coolers, they are relatively cheaper in quality.
• Note that both Intel processors have integrated graphics, while the Ryzen 5 3600 requires a separate graphics card.
• The Ryzen 5 3600 has a decent 32MB of total L3 cache, almost twice the size of its predecessor and more than three times the size of -9500 and -9400F.
• However, this has several disadvantages as the performance and performance of the cache have a large impact on how large the cache capacity is beneficial to the CPU in typical applications.
• The Ryzen 5 3600 drops into the AM4 processor socket on the new X570 motherboards, which will be needed for official support for the PCIe 4.0 interface.
• However, these new boards are more expensive than the previous generation models and are not compatible with valuable chips like the Ryzen 5 3600.
• The good thing is you can also use an older 400 series motherboard (the B450 would do well) as a cheaper alternative.
• However, you will then be deprived of PCIe 4.0, which is one of the major selling points of the new CPUs.
• The Ryzen 3000 chips officially support dual-channel DDR4-3200 memory, a step up from the previous generation of DDR4-2966 support.
• AMD has greatly improved memory compatibility and overclocking capabilities, but you still need to follow the rules that dictate the maximum supported frequency based on the DIMM type and socket population.
• The Ryzen 3000 also supports memory overclocking, either through manual tweaking, or with one-click A-XMP profiles with more expensive kits to bypass these rules.

The Ryzen 5 3600 is the third generation processor from AMD, which is distinguished by its cost-effectiveness. At around $ 189.99, the processor promises to be faster than Intel’s Core i7 8700K, which costs almost twice. With a Hexa core, the chip also has speeds of up to 4.2 GHz, allowing overclocking for higher performance.

AMD RYZEN 5 3600 benchmarks

PCGN test stand: MSI MEG ACE X570 / MSI Gaming M7 AC X470, 16GB Trident Z Royal / Corsair Dominator @ 3200MHz, Samsung 970 Evo 2TB, Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti, Corsair HX1200i, Corsair H100i V2, Philips BDM3275

AMD RYZEN 5 3600 performance

The overall net return of your investment in the Ryzen 5 3600X versus the Ryzen 5 3600 is negligible in our gaming benchmarks – if at all. The Ryzen 5 3600 is equally efficient in Far Cry New Dawn and Total War: Three Kingdoms, and within a frame or two in Assassin’s Creed: Origins, Metro Exodus, and F1 2019.

The Ryzen 5 3600 looks like a bull’s eye for the highest distinction of gaming chips

Offering seemingly the same gaming performance as its more expensive counterpart, it goes without saying that Master Ryzen 3000 is the cheaper one: the Ryzen 5 3600. Also outperforming the Ryzen 7 2700X and 2600X, the dominant performance of this chip extends beyond processor generations and naming – a sign of growth IPC Zen 2 at work.

However, we can see that in synthetic benchmarks, the difference between the Ryzen 5 3600 and the Ryzen 5 3600X increases slightly. These extra clocks are finally paying off.

However, in the generational breakdown, the Ryzen 5 3600 beats its predecessor in single-core and multi-threaded synthetic workloads, proving once again that Zen 2 is a welcome upgrade from what was before.

However, the most marked improvement across all Ryzen generations is in the electrical department. From 226 watts of the Ryzen 5 2600X under load in x264 v.5 to 143 watts in the Ryzen 5 3600, switching to the 7nm process node proved cost effective in reducing the unquenchable thirst of the initial Zen design.

The Ryzen 5 3600 is a 65W six-core, twelve-thread processor that is perfect for small size fanatics. Built with AMD Zen2 architecture, this innovative chip can easily change the base clock from 3.6 GHz to 4.2 GHz, providing more than enough speed for creative or productive gaming and applications.

Gaming Benchmarks

Our first test of the game is Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, where the R5 3600 slightly outperforms the 1% low 8700K score, despite being a few frames slower on average. Even so, you can very much call what we see here a performance close to the 8700K from the new Ryzen 5 3600.

Similar to what we saw in the R9 3900X and 3700X review, the 3rd Gen Ryzen processors slipped a bit in this title at 1440p and that is also true for the R5 3600. Here it’s 6% slower than the 8700K, not a huge margin but normally you could expect things to close at 1440p.

The Battlefield V results are a bit disappointing, though I have to remind myself that the 3600 doesn’t compete with the 8700K. Its main target should be 9600K and here it improves 1% low efficiency by 23%.

Even at 1440p, even though 9600K seemed faster at average frames per second, the 1% low performance of the 3600 was 18% higher, which allowed for a smoother and more consistent gameplay experience.

Then we have Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and here the 3600 matches the 9600K, which is a good figure considering 9600K costs more. The 1440p’s results were pretty much the same, the 9600K was a few frames ahead, but the overall performance was competitive, and the 3600’s 1% low performance was much faster than any of the second-gen Ryzen parts.

Moving on to The Division 2. At 1080p, the R5 3600 overtook the 9600K and made a significant step up not only from the 2600X, but also the 2700X. Interestingly, this time at 1440p, the Ryzen 3600 was able to overtake the 9600K when viewed at 1% low performance. The R5 3600 was also slightly faster than the 2700X and 8700K as it matched the 8-core 3700X.

As you’d expect from Ryzen, the performance in Far Cry New Dawn wasn’t the best compared to Intel’s rival processors, but the overall gameplay was still fluid. Even at 1440p, the R5 3600 is still well below the 9600K, especially when looking at the 1% wells.

Performance in World War Z was also low compared to Intel processors, but at well above 100fps, it probably doesn’t really matter much in this case. Ryzen processors form a kind of bottleneck in this title, and we can see what appears to be a 135fps limitation at 1440p, which is very strange considering Intel processors overclocked to 150fps.

The Ryzen 5 3600 was solid in the Rage 2, averaging 160fps, meaning it wasn’t much slower than the 9600K. Moreover, the R5 3600 was fast enough to find the limitations of the RTX 2080 Ti at 1440p, though that was true of nearly all of the CPUs we tested.

Overclocking

As with the 3700X and 3900X, there is not much headroom for overclocking on the Ryzen R5 3600. The best thing we could do with the all-in-one liquid cooler was overclock the entire core to 4.2 GHz. Again, it’s best to enable the PBO + AutoOC feature in the Ryzen Master software. This improved the result of the Cinebench R20 multi-core processor by just 4%.

Here we can see that PBO + AutoOC improved the single-core score by 1.6%, so I suspect most won’t bother with overclocking as it’s not really worth the extra heat. While on that, let’s check out the thermal performance of the included Wraith Stealth box cooler.

In this article, we will take an in-depth look at the mid-range AMD CPU, how well it performs as a gaming CPU, compare it to others in the same spec and price range, and see if it’s worth paying extra for the new AMD 5000 line, or if the 3600 is still a good choice for players (the answer is yes!).

Cinebench R15 and R20

Among the most used predictors of relative processor performance are the Cinebench R15 and R20 benchmarks, which provide a good measure of strength in demanding, multi-threaded content authoring applications. These are strictly CPU-focused tests that measure both the performance of a single core and the performance of a multi-core CPU when it is under load. The resulting results are proprietary numbers that represent the capabilities of the processor when rendering a complex 3D image.

So, right away, it comes as no surprise that the Ryzen 5 3600XT leads both the Core i5-10600K and the Ryzen 5 3600X in these tests. But the really interesting thing is that it’s not that far from the Core i5-10600K as you’d expect given Intel’s last year.

Remember earlier mention of 12 threads supported by Core i5-10600K? Intel’s restoration of Hyper-Threading technology with thread doubling on its Core i3, i5 and i7 midrange processors with 10th Generation “Comet Lake-S” processors is a huge deal in such tests. The best Core i5 chips in 2019 were six-core / six-thread, while the Core i5-10600K has six cores / 12 threads.

iTunes

To get a different kind of real-world look at single-core performance, we’re using, say, Apple’s well-matured version of iTunes to encode a series of music tracks. It remains in our test suite simply as a representative of the older software we all use from time to time that has not been optimized for multi-core performance.

In turn, the Ryzen 5 3600XT is not that far behind the Core i5-10600K in the single-core test. (What is this inverted world?) The chip once again offers solid improvements over the original Ryzen 5 3600X, all while filling a gap in Intel’s latest offerings.

POV-Ray

The POV-Ray benchmark is a synthetic, multi-threaded rendering test that offers a second opinion on Cinebench results. This test uses ray tracing to render (off-screen) a three-dimensional image. (Note that it does not use the ray tracing feature of Nvidia’s RTX class GPUs; this is purely CPU focused.

While the multi-core POV-Ray result may not be hanging on the wall of AMD’s trophies, the 41-second improvement in the single-core CPU range over the Ryzen 5 3600X is a strong result worth mentioning.

Handbrake and Blender

As a benchmark for rendering of all cores, the Handbrake test is an excellent indicator of how well the CPU will handle tasks such as video editing, video rendering, and video conversion as these kinds of apps tend to chew up all the cores and threads they may get…

Strange results in this test. For some reason, the XT fared worse than not only the Core i5-10600K, but also the AMD chips that were supposed to follow it. Both the Ryzen 5 3600X and the Ryzen 3600 (not shown in the chart) were faster than the 3600XT in this test.

Meanwhile, Blender’s shorter test run with our test file is mostly useful for highlighting the huge differences between low-end and high-end chips and the similarities between the chips in the two categories.

The Blender put everything back in order (as far as it is capable of considering such small gaps in timing), and the Ryzen 5 3600XT scores by a second with 3600X and 3600 scores.

And here, in the 7-Zip file compression test, another task that requires a lot of threads and a lot of CPU power.

In this test, the AMD Ryzen 5 3600XT just takes names in its price range. Record for categories so if you are compressing a lot of files every day, today well, today is your lucky day.

Gaming Benchmarks: Ryzen 5 3600XT Frame Rates

This is where the Ryzen 5 3600XT value proposition – which was so clear for the Ryzen 5 3600X! – it becomes a bit unclear.

As a content creator, there is no doubt that this layout is a solid proposition for mid-range buyers. Technically it shows an improvement over its predecessors (in every test except Handbrake) and can also give the Intel Core i5-10600K a chance to get some money in this kind of work.

However, when we focus on games and raw FPS, we face the Ryzen 3 3300X. The original Ryzen 3 3600X was beaten by the 3300X when you consider their prices (the Ryzen 5 costs more than twice the MSRP), so now the Ryzen 5 3600XT has a hard work: making a value argument against a member of its own stack.

The Ryzen 5 3600XT recovers the edge the Ryzen 5 3600X lost with the introduction of the Ryzen 3 3300X, but once again that may not be enough to justify the value proposition in the eyes of 1080p gamers. It depends on the games they are playing and the resolution of the monitor you have. (See our guide to the best gaming processors for more on this.)

Unexpectedly, a place to shine is in the hearts of 4K gamers. The Ryzen 5 3600XT consistently returned faster 4K results than the Ryzen 3 3300X, and while most games were only won in a few frames per second if we are talking about demanding 4K, every extra frame you can handle makes a difference. These frames don’t come as easily as in 1080p.

Intel continues to prove that its approach to chip design when it comes to gaming bezels is a consistently faster option compared to AMD when you look at similarly priced chips. However, the gap is no longer as great as it used to be, as evidenced by the above results from the Core i5-10600K and the Ryzen 5 3600XT. Given the suggested retail price of $ 249 for the Ryzen 5 3600XT, the Core i5-10600K is no longer in the mid-range as an unmistakable option for 1080p gamers who can also run entry-level authoring tasks on the same PC. The 12-thread Hyper-Threading feature, brought back by Intel, is just in time to prevent the Core i5-10600K from completely writing off as any value for creative types.

Everything worked fine right out of the box with the Ryzen 5 3600XT, with no BIOS updates related to compatibility or “#AMDdrivers” issues, which made it much easier to jump straight to our benchmark suite.

Comparison

Let’s forget all the specs in our final comparison and see how these CPU cousins ​​fare against each other in some core benchmarks and what really matters… gaming performance.

As you might expect, the 3600 dominates single-core testing, running 21% more efficiently than the 2600. The 3600 have a similar 19-21% win in handling multi-core loads. Overclocking just solidifies the 3600’s superiority, with 19% singles and 16-19% multi-core wins.

Testing these processors in different titles with the Nvidia 2060S graphics card brings a bit more combat than the 2600, ensuring a 3% win in overwatch at 1080p, both processors surpass the 130fps limit. However, from then on, it was day 3600, scoring a minimum of 5% W for GTA V and PUBG, a 14% FPS victory in Fortnite and 18% of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive triumphs.

Moving to the RTX 2080 Ti GPU for demanding UHQ 1080p games like Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, we get impressive performance from both processors. 3600 wins in the end, but with just one frame, all with a minimum frame rate of 54 fps.

the 3600 takes a huge victory for Rainbow Six Siege in the ultra-quality 1080p, but when you raise it to the UQ of 1440p, we’re back to winning a single frame rate for 3600, an average of 164fps. It may as well be that the 2600 will never beat the 3600, but the fact that it keeps up and achieves these stats is still very impressive.

Then we have Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and here the 3600 matches the 9600K, which is a good figure considering 9600K costs more. The 1440p’s results were pretty much the same, the 9600K was a few frames ahead, but the overall performance was competitive, and the 3600’s 1% low performance was much faster than any of the second-gen Ryzen parts.

Benchmarks

The above benchmarks show that the Ryzen 5 3600 is fully capable of supporting a wide variety of games. Moreover, these benchmarks are only slightly lower than those offered by the 3600X. The 3600 offers the same gaming performance as its peers, at a much lower cost.

The fact that it also overtakes the previous-generation Ryzen 7 2700X, a higher model, is evidence of the enhanced capabilities of the IPC Zen 2.

Pros and Cons

The AMD Ryzen 5000 hit the shelves in November 2020, effectively displacing 3600. Does that mean the 3600 is already obsolete? Absolutely not. The 3600 is still an impressive CPU that is likely to have big discounts in the future, especially considering that the 5000 series has been plagued by availability issues since its release.

It is worth noting, however, that the 3600 does not include the Zen 3 architecture of the Ryzen 5000 series, which is a significant improvement over the previous model in terms of gaming performance. So if you’re looking for top ratings for single core performance, the Ryzen 5 5600X is worth the extra money.

But if you’re just looking for a great processor that has a powerful punch for a low price, the AMD 3600 is still a strong contender in all respects.