AMD Ryzen 5 5600X Review

AMD Ryzen 5 5600X Review

Conclusion

Gaming performance is paramount to the success of any processor with fewer than double digit cores. If you’re a professional video editor or renderer or even just an enthusiastic amateur then you’ll know that you need all the cores that money can supply to maximise your productivity and speed up your work flow. It’s almost a built in expense. In the same way that you can’t record professional quality video on a setup costing under a thousand pounds, so if you need to produce high quality images of any sort in a timely manner then you’ll have to bust the bank to fill your system up. Thankfully as we saw on the fifth of November that is something ably handled by the Ryzen 9 CPUs.

With six cores and twelve threads available to it the Ryzen 5 5600X is a workhorse processor, able to get you through if there is less time pressure on your work. Indeed we saw from our various 3D rendering benchmarks – Blender, CineBench – and our video encoding ones – x265, H265, Sony Vegas and DaVinci Resolve – that the Ryzen 5 5600X is no slouch and definitely an improvement upon the previous generations of Ryzen CPUs at this core count as well as many of the Intel offerings. We won’t pretend that it’ll revolutionise your life, but it’s a nice upgrade to much that has come before, especially at this low price point.

Where AMD have really worked their magic is on the clock speed side of things, particularly on those tasks that only require one or two of the cores on the Ryzen 5 5600X to do their thing. We saw with our Ryzen 9 review that the single threaded performance from the latest AMD processors is amazing, and the Ryzen 5 continues to be a beacon of excellence, breaking the magical 600 points in CineBench R20 in everything but our stock setup, and even then it was only 2 points underneath that barrier. The Intel Core i5-10600K it’s aimed against just scrapes 500. This pays dividends throughout your daily use as so many programs and applications – lighting, peripheral control etc – only want one or two cores because they have to run on almost anything this side of the proverbial toaster.

Gaming is the real world demonstration of any system though. We all might pretend we’ll use our computer for everything, but if we’re not browsing the internet we’re gaming, and here the Ryzen 5 5600X shines. As we said this particular CPU is targeted at the Intel Core i5-10600K, and in all of our gaming benchmarks the AMD CPU either matched or bettered the Intel. Something that wasn’t true before on the Ryzen 5 3600X, as you can see from our graph, but definitely is now. It’s a spectacular all-rounder and now brings gaming performance to go with the other benefits of the AM4 platform such as PCI Express 4.0.

With a price tag of around £280 the Ryzen 5 5600X is the perfect desktop CPU for those on a budget who want to maximise their gaming pleasure without compromising those times when you want your system to show off your gaming exploits or generate models or textures for a game mod. It’s power efficiency and low temperature allied to excellent manual overclocking performance and the ‘nearly human’ Precision Boost Overclocking makes it an absolute steal.

AMD Ryzen 5 5600X Review  

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