For years now, the advice for PC gamers pondering a new build has gone something like this: Spend as much as you can on your graphics card, then pick up the cheapest CPU, motherboard and RAM you can find that won’t handicap your GPU too badly. For most people, that means picking up a mid-range chip in the $200 to $300 range. The CPU we’re testing today falls squarely in the centre of this competitive category: the $249 Ryzen 5 3600X, a six-core, twelve-thread chip based on the 7nm process.
Third-gen Ryzen has proven to be a huge step forward for AMD in our reviews of the $329 Ryzen 7 3700X and $499 Ryzen 9 3900X, so we’re expecting a lot here – whether it’s Intel or AMD, moving from six cores to an octo-core monster has typically delivered only an incremental rise in gaming performance, so you should be able to save a lot of money here with only a minimal hit to gaming prowess. To see if this theory holds up, we’ll be stacking up the Ryzen 5 3600X not only against its immediate competitor – the Core i5 9600K – but also the higher end offerings from both Intel and AMD.
Before we get into the results, it’s worth briefly covering what the Ryzen 5 3600X brings to the table. This is a Zen 2 design, like the Ryzen 3700X and 3900X, but this processor includes only one partially-enabled chiplet with six cores and twelve threads enabled out of the eight cores and sixteen threads in the fully-enabled design. That’s two cores fewer than the 3700X at the same rated boost clock, so heavily multi-threaded performance – tasks like video rendering or scientific computing – could be noticeably worse but more usual tasks like PC gaming operate with very similar performance levels. You may notice that the 3600X has a higher TDP (95W vs 65W) than the 3700X, making it less power-efficient but potentially minimising the performance differential. You can see the full 3rd-gen Ryzen stack in the table below:
Compared to the previous Zen and Zen+ architectures found in the first and second generation Ryzen designs, Zen 2 makes some pretty big changes. First, the actual processing takes place in chiplets fabricated on a 7nm process, which allows for greater performance while using less power and generating less heat than than previous-gen 12nm designs. I/O is handled on its own die using that older 12nm process, as this is easier to produce and the advantages of 7nm are less impactful here. Despite its plus points, the chiplet design does incur a performance penalty when it comes to memory access times, so AMD has doubled the size of the L3 cache to compensate for this. On a deeper level, Zen 2 also includes a more efficient branch predictor and better AVX instruction handling, a weakness of past Zen architectures. All things considered, AMD promises substantially better single-core and multi-core performance, which should make the 3600X and other third-gen Ryzen designs more competitive in more scenarios than their predecessors.