EXCELLENT EVERYDAY PERFORMANCE
To judge the Ryzen 5 3600X’s performance, I compared its results on our
benchmark tests with those of several of its Ryzen alternatives, as well as a few
older Intel competitors. These include the Ryzen 5 3600 and the preceding
Ryzen 5 2600X.
I’ve also included AMD CPUs one rung above and below the Ryzen 5 3600X.
The Ryzen 5 3400G is a $149 chip that has fewer cores and a lower TDP, while
the Ryzen 7 3700X is an eight-core, 16-thread chip that is our Editors’ Choice
winner for best mainstream CPU. It’s always helpful to see what kind of
performance you can expect by slightly increasing your CPU budget, since the
processor is often the most important component in a PC build.
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intensive tasks such as rendering a 3D image. The Ryzen 5 3600X did
admirably here, besting all comers except for the Ryzen 7 3700X on the all-
cores Cinebench test. When running on just a single core, the Ryzen 5 3600X
was a tad slower than both the Ryzen 7 3700X and the Core i7-8700K.
Single-core performance is important if you’re relying on older software that’s
not optimized for today’s many-core CPUs, and it’s an area in which Ryzen
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i7-8700K demonstrates a clear advantage.
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expected performance while using Handbrake, a modern open-source app
designed to scale with more CPU cores and threads. The results are predictable
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outpacing the less expensive Ryzen 5 3400G.
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intensive task that we simulate with our 7-Zip benchmark. Here, the results
closely mirrored those of the Cinebench all-cores test, with the Ryzen 5 3600X
faster than all but the Ryzen 7 3700X and the Core i7-8700K.