Ryzen 5 3600X: This Season’s Other Man in Red

‘Tis the season to be spending for yourself, or for others. Thank you Holiday consumerism for filling the dark void in everyone’s cynical hearts. For the more tech-oriented among us, we might be on the search for the newest gadget or upgrading your PC. If you’re part of the latter, you’re in luck. AMD‘s got your back for a good bang-for-your-buck CPU upgrade with the Ryzen 5 3600X.

Ryzen 5 3600X: The Everyman’s Power House

The Ryzen 5 3600X belongs to the newest generation of Zen processors that AMD released. It boasts a 7nm CPU architecture and promises a significant increase in performance to last generation. While Zen 2 has been out for a few months already, the holidays are are probably the best excuse to pick one up if you’ve been dying for an upgrade.

Ryzen 5 3600X has 6 cores and 12 threads. It has a base clock of 3.8GHz and is advertised to boost up to 4.4GHz. Whether it boost that high with just the included Wraith Spire cooler, we’ll get into later.

Like all Ryzen chips, this one is overclockable given that you put it in the right motherboard like a Bx50 board or a Xx70 board. As per AMD’s promise of accessible upgradabilty, older generation motherboards will work fine as long as you update your BIOS. 

Ryzen 5 3600X: Giving It A Test Drive

In our tests, we put the Ryzen 5 3600X in an ASUS ROG Crosshair VIII Hero (WiFi), an X570 board. It had the included Wraith Spire cooler (with thermal paste applied) cool it down as well. It was then outfitted with the following components:

• 16GB of DDR 3600MHz RAM
• GTX 1070
• 250GB SSD
• 650w 80+ Gold PSU

There was no case so the components were put in an open air environment. 

The chip was subjected to a few tests and benchmarks. These tests were:

• Cinebench R15
• CPU-Z Benchmark
• GeekBench
• CS:GO
• Apex Legends

We also tried to overclock the chip and see how much more we could gain from it. Take note that the cooler used is the cooler included in the package. As such, whatever temperatures we observe may not be as low as if we were using a better air cooler or water cooling. Also, this means that there may be more overclocking headroom than was shown here if a better cooler was used.

Results

Let’s start with the out of the box testing. We didn’t turn on XFR for our tests so these tests and benchmarks are running completely non-overclocked.

• Our non-overclocked chip hit 4.15GHz with temps hovering around the high 70 and low 80 degrees.
• On the other hand, we managed to overclock the chip to 4.25GHz at 1.35v with temps reaching around high 80 degrees. With the stock cooler, trying to go to 4.3GHz using a higher voltage will get the chip to its thermal limits at 95 degrees.

Cinebench:

We did three runs of Cinebench and averaged the scores of the three runs.

• For the non-overclocked tests, we got an average of 1612 and all the tests completed at around 26 seconds. On the other hand, the single core score is at 200 and was completed around 3 minutes and 20 seconds.
• For the overclocked tests, we got an average of 1666 for the multicore tests and all the tests completed at around 25 seconds. The single core test showed 199 and it finished at around 3 minutes 21 seconds. 

CPU-Z:

We did three runs for this benchmark as well and averaged out the scores. The non-overclocked tests got an average of 4120 for multi thread. The single thread score averaged at 511. The overclocked results averaged a score of 4259 for multi thread. The single thread score, on the other hand, averaged at 515.

We also picked the i7-8700K as reference for the scores. We chose this because there doesn’t seem to be data from the newer i7-9700K so we chose the closest model. The i7-8700K also has 6 cores and 12 threads. It has a base clock of 3.7GHz and a max of 4.7GHz. According to CPU-Z the 3600X out performs the 8700K in multi thread but not in the single thread scores.

GeekBench:

We also used GeekBench and the results will be shown below

Non-OC:

OC:

Apex Legends:

We tested Apex Legends by lowering the resolution to 720p and putting all the settings to low. This is to ensure that the FPS reflects mostly the processing power of the CPU and not put so much stress on the graphics card. We used Fraps to log our FPS data.

Non-overclocked:

• Avg FPS:  186
• Min. FPS: 117
• Max. FPS: 270

Overclocked:

• Avg FPS:  184
• Min. FPS: 134
• Max. FPS: 283

CS:GO

We tested CS:GO by lowering the resolution to 720p and putting all the settings to low. This is to ensure that the FPS reflects mostly the processing power of the CPU and not put so much stress on the graphics card. We used Fraps to log our FPS data.

Non-overclocked:

• Avg FPS:  269
• Min. FPS: 239
• Max. FPS: 296

Overclocked:

• Avg FPS:  277
• Min. FPS: 249
• Max. FPS: 299

Conclusion

AMD’s new Ryzen 5 3600X is a great do-it-all CPU. With its great multi-core performance it’s ideal for content creators on a budget who are looking to render videos and pictures. Furthermore, it can handle gaming on the side as well. Priced a around P12k-P13k, it’s at a reasonable price for a CPU of this caliber.