Review: AMD Ryzen 5 3600X Six core processor

^ That really helps, thanks! Got no bacon in the house

P.S. Great review HH.

 

I'll take bacon discussion over Intel/AMD fanboys at each other's throats any day.

I recently got a big 'ol slab of salt pork. Cut it thick and fry it up like bacon, so good. I think they use more sugar in the brine than with bacon.

 

Just an FYI. You can easily get a core i9 9900k for $430 bucks US. $600 is no where near what they cost now. Yes some online retailers will be overcharging customers but if you look you can find deals everywhere. Microcenter is 1 place and I think you get $30 or $50 off if you pair with a motherboard to get even more savings.

I'm not taking anything away from the 3600x. It's a decent little chip. Personally though I'm not supporting Zen 2. I'm going to wait to see what Intel brings out again and what zen 3 offers. And I can wait. I already have two great PCs that don't need upgrades. I'm not a big chiplet fan but I guess that might be the direction everybody's going. I hope not.

 

Couldn't agree more

 

I'm thinking hard about upgrading from my 3930k to Zen2.
I'm ... just stuck on which one to choose. Thus old CPU of mine lasted me frigging 7 years. Was very futureproof altough ad tad expensive at the start to use it just for gaming.

Now, with this experience I can't choose between the 3600 and the 3700x. Both a yummy 65w after my 135w chip.
Problem is... apart from the IPC upgrade I don't really future proof myself with just another 6C/12T , so that 3700x looks good. Memory wise even the old quad channel hold its own somewhat.
Then again, no real use in gaming right now and is about €150 more expensive...
I really want a comparison with performance charts shoved under my nose to convice me... but I guess Hilbert doesn't do requests eh?


Waaaaah, I dunnoooo! gnnn!

EDIT: I wasn't aware Ryzen 3000 wad 36mb of cache... hmz.. might be the arguement.
I also see a few comparisons and it seems a 1600x is more or less the 3930k equivalent?

 

Another great review Hilbert, cheers.
AMD are certainly ticking all the boxes accross their lineup and with unbelievable value accross that same board too. I'm stunned by just how much my ageing 5960x is so resoundly beaten on all fronts by this, AMD's second lowest processor in this lineup. A move to AMD is guaranteed though I'm waiting for the 3950x reviews before I choose between that or the 3900x, the new base lasting me another 4-5yrs.

As already mentioned, Zen2 is clearly doing a much, much better job of automatically allocating extra juice when needed to the extent that it's able to ramp up reduced cores higher than any manual all-core overclock. That's impressive stuff. Of course, Windows improvements helps too!

 

I get 750ms in Kraken benchmark for my overclocked 6700K (4.65Ghz, 3233Mhz RAM 14-15-15-32-240-1T): https://krakenbenchmark.mozilla.org/kraken-1.1/results.html?{"v": "kraken-1.1", "ai-astar":[111,97,97,111,97,112,97,111,98,97],"audio-beat-detection":[41,44,47,43,45,45,41,44,41,42],"audio-dft":[61,63,63,62,62,64,61,67,61,62],"audio-fft":[29,29,30,31,30,29,30,29,27,30],"audio-oscillator":[35,36,35,36,35,36,36,35,35,36],"imaging-gaussian-blur":[77,75,75,75,76,78,75,75,75,76],"imaging-darkroom":[127,128,129,127,127,127,126,128,126,127],"imaging-desaturate":[37,37,38,37,37,37,38,37,37,37],"json-parse-financial":[32,32,33,32,34,32,32,32,32,32],"json-stringify-tinderbox":[16,15,16,16,15,16,15,16,16,16],"stanford-crypto-aes":[50,49,49,48,49,49,51,48,48,48],"stanford-crypto-ccm":[55,56,55,56,55,64,55,55,54,55],"stanford-crypto-pbkdf2":[59,60,64,59,59,57,63,59,59,61],"stanford-crypto-sha256-iterative":[27,24,23,24,23,24,23,25,29,23]}
I think a lot of it will come down to clock speed, but also maybe the latencies within the chip and RAM - I think the simple 4 core high clocked Intel CPUs do the best in this test. For instance my result would be 4th in that list of CPUs, yet the 9900K is way down the list with 990 points in 10th position even though it can run 1 thread at 5Ghz - I think RAM latencies are higher with a big chip like that. Test results probably in turn also influenced by your RAM speed and RAM latency - you've got really fast RAM at low latencies, so I'm guessing that gives a massive boost to your 8700K in this test. Likewise, my RAM is not too shabby from a latency perspective either, and I'm getting good results here too. It makes you think doesn't it...it makes you think that maybe some of these latest massive CPUs (8 core plus), maybe aren't the best CPUs for light workloads like web browsing & light desktop use - maybe the smaller, simpler, and also high clocked Intel CPUs could be the better CPUs for snappiness in web browsing, etc - as seen in this test.

EDIT: although this latest 3xxx series of Ryzen is really bucking the trend and showing good scores in Kraken (top of the table) even though they're big chips, they've made a massive improvement here in comparison to their previous generation, and faster even than Intel's large CPUs (9900K). I bet though if you tested a 7700K @5Ghz+ and paired with fast low latency RAM, then I bet that would top the tables in this test.

 

I managet to get the 3600 with a Gigabyte x470 Aorus on sale. Best bang for the buck i could find after i missed the 2700 at 150 usd.

 

I'm really hope Apple go all AMD very soon, especially for the MacBook pro. With a much fairer price to mach.

 

If they do that, it'll still cost the same to performance ratio, as there's no way Apple would lower the prices of their products just because it costs them less, they'd instead increase their profit margin.

 

There's a chance Apple is going to ditch x86 entirely. I find it very unlikely they will ever go to AMD for CPUs.

 

Wow, talk about bang for your buck!

 

Yup, about the same chance as Hell freezing over. Waaay too many iSheep.

 

Then again, Apple are all about profit. If they can secure a deal from AMD, particularly one that increases profit, then, maybes aye.

 

Very nice chip and for gaming it seems a better choice than the 3700x. The big question is how good is the 3600? I think Hilbert already hinted that the 3600 is a little gem but i could be wrong...

But the lack of overclocking headroom is really disappointing for me... Why can´t the chips reach 4.6 or 4.8Ghz...

Great review as always!

 

That's been rumoured for years. Still hasn't happened yet.

 

Not that I really keep up with Apple rumors but I haven't heard of anything like that up until about a year ago. The rumors I heard are a transition to ARM, since Apple is already heavily invested in their own ARM-based CPUs for iOS. If Apple just squeezes in some of the more advanced instructions, I'm sure they could reliably drop x86.
I guess the thing to really consider here is if Apple is going to ditch Intel, they're more likely to use their own in-house ARM architecture than go with AMD.

 

If only AMD would lower X570 prices 30% down to reasonable level, the whole platform would be very attractive over Intel.