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 |