AMD Ryzen 5 3600 Processor

Keeop reviews AMD Ryzen 5 3600 Processor

My original plan was to upgrade an old i5 machine with a cheap i7/motherboard bundle off eBay but then the lock-down hit and these bundles that you could get for around a ton were now selling for more than double. No value there any more. So, looked at new and this CPU seemed to offer the best price to performance ratio out there. It would need a new motherboard and RAM but it still seemed to make sense. There was some initial debate between getting this or the 3600x but for another fifty quid, it didn’t really seem worth it for another 200MHz.

Now, this CPU is fast. Compared to the old i5 it replaced, chalk and cheese. It’s almost on par with my main PCs i7-8700K which is clocked at 5GHz – those extra cores and threads in the Ryzen seem to make everything seem quicker even though the actual clock is a lot lower. I have did play around with overclocking until reading a lot of doom and gloom threads on the subject so reigned it in a tad. I did have it running comfortably on an all core overclock at 4.2GHz at under 1.3V but the extra performance is not massive so binned it. I am using the standard Auto OC feature set at 200Mhz to get a little boost on the cores but, to be honest, I don’t think it’s doing much. When monitoring, the highest I have seen a single core run is 4175. But, as I said, the performance increase is marginal at best so not really worried with messing about with it. They’re not like Intels where you can add on a ton of clock – the i5 this replaced was a 2.8GHz clock overclocked to 4GHz and my i7 is 3.7GHz at stock!

So, no need to overclock, unless you like to tinker and the only real gains are those you’ll see in benchmarks rather than real world. The main boost to speed here is having good, fast memory.

I did replace the stock cooler for an aftermarket one though as I did find the stock one a little noisy and the temps seemed pretty high. I purchased an Arctic Freezer 34 eSports Duo and it took 20 degrees off the temps and this is with a very low fan speed set but the stock is adequate.

So, if you kept the stock cooler, got a reasonable B450 motherboard, 16Gb of pretty good RAM, the whole set up can be had for around three hundred quid which is incredible value for the performance you end up. That’s what I paid for just my i7 two years ago and there’s really not much difference in performance. – CPU Mark actually gives a better score to the AMD!

One last thing to note on swapping out Intel innards to AMD, I had no issues whatsoever with Windows 10 – it just fired up straight away with no issues whatsoever.