He previously covered the consumer tech beat as a news reporter for PCMag in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, where he rode in several self-driving cars and witnessed the rise and fall of many startups. On Far Cry 5, all the processors managed approximately 70fps at 4K resolution. Not at all. Comment before PM £200.00 GBP. The display of third-party trademarks and trade names on this site does not necessarily indicate any affiliation or the endorsement of PCMag. The 3700X does offer a small performance boost over the 3600X in Shadow of the Tomb Raider but the 3600X was only up to 3% faster than the 3600. PCMag.com is a leading authority on technology, delivering Labs-based, independent reviews of the latest products and services. How to Free Up Space on Your iPhone or iPad, How to Save Money on Your Cell Phone Bill, How to Find Free Tools to Optimize Your Small Business, How to Get Started With Project Management, The Best Graphics Cards for 4K Gaming in 2021. The Intel competition currently lacks this last feature, and combined with multithreading support, it firmly tips the scales in the Ryzen 5 3600X's favor, at least in the eyes of the future-proofing enthusiast. The CPUs themselves are otherwise identical. The cache size is important for apps that need fast access to a system's memory, a category that includes many graphics-intensive PC games. We're not into guessing games at TechSpot, so we've run some hard benchmarks to decide. We recommend avoiding the 3600X and instead buy the more affordable $175 Ryzen 5 3600. We were among the first publications to review the Ryzen 5 3600 and at $200 we found the 6-core, 12-thread processor a crankin’ good deal. Both of the third-gen Ryzen 5 chips feature 24 CPU-based PCI Express 4.0 lanes and 16 chipset lanes. Finally, no matter what your reason for buying a new CPU, it's hard to argue with the Ryzen 5 3600X's backwards motherboard compatibility and support for the cutting-edge PCIe 4.0 standard. Its clock speeds are similar, at 3.7GHz base and 4.6GHz boost, and it has the same 95-watt rated power consumption. We only see a 1 fps difference in The Division 2 and we should also note that the 3600X and 3600 match the 3700X in this title and we saw a similar thing when testing with Battlefield V and Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. If you don't want to pay the $80 premium for the Ryzen 7 3700X, however, the Ryzen 5 3600X is an excellent option. When running on just a single core, the Ryzen 5 3600X … The Ryzen 5 3600X did admirably here, besting all comers except for the Ryzen 7 3700X on the all-cores Cinebench test. Even when it comes to power draw there’s virtually no difference. Using the included box cooler we see virtually no difference in power draw between the 3600X and 3600 and the same is also true when using an aftermarket cooler. We see the same in Battlefield V, the 3600X was only up to 2 fps faster than the non-X model, so about the same performance. Backwards-compatible with older AM4 motherboards. If you're building a powerful PC to perform these tasks, you'll want to invest in a far more capable processor, such as a Ryzen Threadripper or Intel Core i9. The Ryzen 5 3600 comes clocked at 3.6 GHz for the base and 4.2 GHz for the boost, the 3600X runs 200 MHz faster at 3.8 GHz and 4.4 GHz, so a 6% base clock increase and a 5% boost clock increase. I've also included AMD CPUs one rung above and below the Ryzen 5 3600X. The Ryzen 5 3600X did admirably here, besting all comers except for the Ryzen 7 3700X on the all-cores Cinebench test. The $199 Ryzen 5 3600, meanwhile, is a 65-watt part that comes in at 3.6GHz base and 4.2GHz boost. Not for nothing this series of AMD processors have been our picks for the best all-round value since release and they're also among the best selling CPUs on Amazon. PCMag, PCMag.com and PC Magazine are among the federally registered trademarks of Ziff Davis, LLC and may not be used by third parties without explicit permission. AMD Ryzen 5 3600X processors are ideal for serious high-definition gaming with 6 cores, 12 threads, and a max boost clock of 4.4GHz. These include the Core i5-9600K, a six-core chip that at $263 costs roughly the same as the Ryzen 5 3600X. It also offers significant ancillary benefits—much larger caches and PCI Express 4.0 support—that will appeal to upgraders and system builders who seek a degree of future-proofing. In most cases, the Ryzen 7 3700X slightly exceeds that performance, which is why it retains our Editors' Choice for best mainstream CPU. The second-generation Ryzen 5 2600X is also a six-core, 12-thread, 95-watt chip. To help you fine-tune the performance of the Ryzen 5 3600X, AMD offers the Ryzen Master software utility, which is compatible with all Ryzen CPUs. We suspect the reason so many of you asked for this comparison is once again the misleading TDP ratings. You WILL need an aftermarket cooler if … Intel's latest tenth-generation chips aren't available in mainstream desktop form yet, so the company's chief competitors to the Ryzen 5 3600X are CPUs from the ninth-generation "Coffee Lake" Core i5 family. Then with PBO+AutoOC enabled, the 3600 hit 84 degrees but only ran 25 MHz faster, while the 3600X also hit 84 degrees but ran 50 MHz faster for a 3% increase over the 3600. Follow him on Twitter @branttom. On this title, nearly all the high-end and mainstream CPUs we've tested achieved frame rates around the 400fps mark at 1080p. On the other hand, if you're a casual gamer uninterested in a discrete GPU, you'll want a CPU with a capable built-in graphics processor like the Ryzen 5 3400G.