AMD Ryzen 5 3600X and Core i5 9600K evaluation • iGamesNews.com

For years, suggestions for PC gamers to think about a new version have been this: Spend as much money as possible on your graphics card, and then pick the cheapest CPU, motherboard, and RAM, which won't prevent your GPU from being too bad. For most people, this means choosing mid-range chips that cost between $ 200 and $ 300. The CPU we are testing today is exactly at the center of this competing product: the $ 249 Ryzen 5 3600X, a six-core, twelve-threaded chip based on a 7nm process.

In our review of the $ 329 Ryzen 7 3700X and the $ 499 Ryzen 9 3900X, the third-generation Ryzen has proven to be a huge improvement for AMD, so we expect a lot of things here-whether Intel or AMD , Will change from six-core to eight-core monsters will usually only bring gradual improvement in game performance, so you can save a lot of money with only a small amount of money. In order to understand whether this theory holds, we will compare the Ryzen 5 3600X with its direct competitor Core i5 9600K, and also consider the high-end products of Intel and AMD.

Before getting results, it is necessary to briefly introduce the advantages brought by Ryzen 5 3600X. This is the Zen 2 design, just like the Ryzen 3700X and 3900X, but the processor includes only one of the 8 cores and 16 threads of the fully enabled design with 6 cores and 12 threads of partially enabled small chips . At the same rated boost clock, its core has two fewer cores than the 3700X, so the performance of multi-threaded performance (such as video rendering or scientific computing) may be significantly worse, but for more common tasks (such as PC games) The performance levels are very similar. You may notice that the 3600X has a higher TDP (95W vs 65W) than the 3700X, which reduces power efficiency, but may minimize performance differences. You can see the full third-generation Ryzen stack in the following table:

Compared to the previous Zen and Zen + architectures found in the first and second-generation Ryzen designs, Zen 2 makes some considerable changes. First, the actual processing takes place on a small chip manufactured in a 7nm process. Compared with the previous generation 12nm design, it has higher performance, lower power consumption and less heat generation. I / O is processed on its own chip using an older 12nm process because it is easier to produce, and the advantage of 7nm has less impact here. Despite some advantages, the small chip design does degrade performance in terms of time to access memory, so AMD has doubled the size of the L3 cache to compensate for this. At a deeper level, Zen 2 also includes more efficient branch predictors and better AVX instruction processing, which was a disadvantage of the Zen architecture of the past. Taking all factors into account, AMD promises to significantly improve single-core and multi-core performance, which will make the 3600X and other third-generation Ryzen designs more competitive than its predecessors.

We can discuss microarchitecture all day, but maybe it's best to turn to our topic: actual performance testing. To take a balanced look at the 3600X, we competed against the closest Intel competitors at 1080p, 1440p, and 4K in the last ten games.

To this end, we used a new Windows 10 installation on fast NVMe storage (with relevant security and AMD scheduler patches installed)-in particular, provided our Gigabyte Aorus 2TB NVMe drive for AMD for X570 testing, Very satisfactory on both PCIe 4.0 and PCIe 3.0 expansion slots.

Our main AMD benchmark tests were performed on an entry-level £ 180 MSI MPG X570 Gaming Plus and supplementary tests on a high-end motherboard £ 450 Prestige X570 Creation, both motherboards were lent to us by MSI. Gaming Plus is the cheapest MSI option on the X570 platform. The Creation board is targeted at overclockers and content creators interested in using multiple PCIe 4.0 devices. In addition to more powerful power supply capabilities and extreme memory overclocking capabilities up to 4600MHz or higher, the Creation board also includes a complete PCIe 4.0 channel and a bundled PCIe 4.0 add-on card that can connect two additional M.2 drives. Attack. Meanwhile, the second-generation Ryzen was tested on the £ 380 ASUS ROG Crosshair 8 while the Core processor was tested on the £ 480 ASUS ROG Maximus XI Extreme.

The Ryzen 3600X and other Ryzen processors are cooled by AMD's Wraith Prism cooler, which is a slightly better version of the Wraith Spire that comes with the 3600X. On the Intel side, the game Storm Castle 240mm AiO was used. Our setup includes GSkill Trident Z Royal 3600MHz CL16 RAM provided by AMD, a reliable 850W Gaming Storm PSU and an open-air test bench.

Before we test the game, it is necessary to understand the comparison between 3600X and 9600K and their more expensive competitors in content creation (such as video rendering, transcoding, etc.) To this end, we chose to use the popular Cinebench R20 application, which replicates rendering jobs in the industrial-grade video software Cinema 4D.

The interesting result, to say the least, is that the Ryzen 5 3600X has almost the same single-core performance as the Ryzen 7 3700X, but only lags behind the 3900X. 3600X even surpassed 9600K, which is almost equal to 9700K in single-core operation. We see a similar trend in multi-core results, where 3600X is a 42% increase over 9600K, which is almost equal to 9700K. However, the larger Ryzen processors have a higher number of cores and therefore score much higher, suggesting that the 3600X is much slower when it comes to content creation tasks.

A common task for video producers is transcoding, converting digital video files from one format to another. A popular choice for this task is the handbrake, which forms the basis of our next test. Here, two different encoders, x264 (h.264) and x265 (HEVC), are used to encode the source file using production standard presets and CRF 18 quality settings, and record the average frame rate and measure power consumption.

The "handbrake" result here is consistent with the Cinebench score, in which 3600X is 33% faster than 9600K in h.264 test and 25% faster in HEVC test. However, the 3600X does consume more power to reach these scores. The result measured on the wall is 149W, compared to 132W for Intel systems, which increases power consumption by 13%.

As content creation evolves, it's time to turn our attention to our true passion and much of this review: game performance. After all, with more cores and threads, Ryzen has always done better than its Core counterparts in content creation tasks, but can the advantages of the 7nm Ryzen 3000 series translate into better game performance?

To find out, we looked for repeatable gaming scenarios to best demonstrate the differences between the 3600X and its competitors. Finding these scenarios is not a big challenge-after all we played a lot of games together-but then we need to capture test material to enter them into a custom benchmark system. This is the problem we encountered, because when you are limited by the CPU, any process running in the background or other ic can appear directly in the game in the form of dropped frames or pauses, and in the case of GPU limitations Under these circumstances, these situations usually occur rarely. Even if it works well, different parts of the same scene can lead AMD ahead of AMD and vice versa, so it's worth looking into context-based performance analysis in more depth.

We tested each game at 1080p, 1440p, and 2160p (with one exception) using the fastest consumer GPU RTX 2080 Ti on the market. The 1080p benchmark should be useful for anyone considering using a high refresh rate monitor, but this is the case with the most CPU limitations, so it is more likely to get stuck. 1440p is the best balance between the current resolution and frame rate. Mid-range to high-end systems can reach 60 to 120 fps in most games, and can alleviate the CPU-induced stuttering. Finally, 4K is the least CPU bound and usually the most balanced solution, but some games still show small differences between different processors, so it's worth a look.

AMD Ryzen 5 3600X analysis