Custom PC - UK (2019-12)

Accordingly, AMD only includes the smaller Wraith Stealth

cooler as opposed to the meatier Wraith Spire in the box. If

you’re planning on using the Ryzen 5 3600 in a small case, the

Wraith Stealth is only 54mm tall compared to 71mm for the

Wraith Spire, so it will fit into a greater number of slim PC cases.

In terms of frequencies, there’s 200MHz between them

in both the base frequency and maximum boost frequency,

with the latter sitting at 4.2GHz compared to 4.4GHz for

the Ryzen 5 3600X. If you’re primarily concerned with

content creation and multi-threaded workloads, the Ryzen

5 3600 hit a stock speed all-core boost of 3.974GHz in

our Prime95 and Cinebench tests. That’s 126MHz lower

than the X-edition CPU, which managed to boost to

4.1GHz across all cores in multi-threaded workloads.

They might be slightly lower frequencies than the Ryzen

5 3600X, which costs around £40 more, but they’re

significantly higher numbers than AMD’s Ryzen 5 2600,

which uses the older 12nm Zen+ architecture. This chip

could only boost to 3.9GHz, giving the new CPU a sizeable

300MHz advantage, in addition to the larger cache and

Reviews

REVIEWS / PROCESSOR

SUPPLIERscan.co.uk

AMD RYZEN 5 3600/£191 inc VAT

SOCKET AM4 PROCESSOR

Y

ou really have to pay attention to the clock
frequencies when picking an AMD 3rd-gen Ryzen
CPU, as the company’s pairs of 6-core and 8-core
models are mostly identical in other areas. It’s a very different
situation from Intel’s line-up, where the Core i5-9600K, Core
i7-9700K and Core i9-9900K couldn’t be more different,
with a mix of Hyper-Threading support, number of cores and
the amount of cache making each chip a unique choice.
As a case in point, AMD’s 6-core Ryzen 5 3600 and 3600X
both sport six cores and 12 threads, thanks to Simultaneous
Multithreading (SMT) support. Also, because these CPUs
have two cores disabled over their two Core Complexes,
which sport four cores apiece, both these 7nm CPUs have
1MB less L2 cache than their 8-core counterparts, as each
core is equipped with 512KB of L2 cache. However, they
have the same 32MB L3 cache as the 8-core chips, so you
have parity in this regard as it’s shared across all cores.
There’s another key spec difference between the Ryzen
5 3600 and its X-series sibling, though, which is a claimed
TDP of just 65W, compared to 95W for the Ryzen 5 3600X.

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