Early review of the AMD Ryzen 5 3600 shows why it could be one of the most sought-after CPUs for gaming

The fact that the AMD Ryzen 5 3600 can clearly punch above its weight was evident from several leaked benchmarks over the past few weeks. Now, Spanish site El Chapuzas Informatico has published an early review of the processor that corroborates much of what we've seen so far. It is also very much possible that the leaked numbers could have been from this review.

El Chapuzas notes that the Ryzen 5 2600 was tested on a Gigabyte X470 Aorus Gaming 7 Wi-Fi motherboard with the BIOS F40 update and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition GPU. While multi-core has always been AMD's strong point, this generation seems to have upped the single-core performance quite significantly as we can see from the charts below.

In most single-core CPU tests, the Ryzen 5 3600 is seen to not only surpass the Ryzen 7 2700X but also directly compete with the likes of the Intel Core i7-9700K and the Core i9-9900K, which is commendable. Multi-core scores also show good leads when compared with other hexacore CPUs.

Synthetic graphics scores were promising and almost on par with the Core i9-9900K. The gaming results seem to indicate that the Ryzen 5 3600 will be the staple CPU of most budget and mid-range gamers in the days to come. The CPU stood second to the 9900K in most games by maintaining anywhere between a 7 to 20% deficit. Energy efficiency also seems to have improved in this generation, thanks to the 7nm process. 

What does seem to be of concern is the higher latency approaching almost Athlon 200GE levels, possibly due to the unavoidable inter-CCX and inter-chiplet latency. However, the large cache size and faster Infinity Fabric seem to have offset this latency to a large extent as gaming performance is not too far off from the 9900K for the most part.

Overall, the initial results seem promising and we cannot wait to test this processor ourselves. The fun part would be to see how its bigger siblings such as the Ryzen 7 3800X and Ryzen 9 3950X make mincemeat out of Intel's current desktop offerings.