Updated | AMD Ryzen 5 3600 looks to beat the Intel Core i9-9900K in Geekbench, but it is not really a level playing field

Update: As pointed out by reader Shobith in the comments below, appending .gb4 at the end of the URL indeed indicates that the Ryzen 5 3600 in this benchmark is running close to 4.4 GHz — 200 MHz more than the rated turbo boost of 4.2 GHz. This explains the higher single-core score and is also indicative of the overclocking potential of the chip.

Original Article

Benchmarks for the 'humble' AMD Ryzen 5 3600 have been leaking left, right, and center over the past few days and all of them have indicated that AMD is firmly poised to further nibble away at Intel's mainstream desktop marketshare — so much that Intel is likely to reduce its CPU prices in order to remain competitive. Now, a new Geekbench entry for the Ryzen 5 3600 has surfaced online and a quick comparison reveals that it can actually come within firing range of — hold on a second — the Intel Core i9-9900K!

As always, we'd like to reiterate that all leaks should be taken with a pinch of salt till we get confirmatory numbers soon after the official launch. With that disclaimer out of the way, here are the scores we see. 

The Geekbench listing for the Ryzen 5 3600 shows the processor running on MSI X470 Gaming Plus motherboard with 16 GB of RAM. The Ryzen 5 3600 seems to have scored 6,440 points in single-core and 32,912 points in multi-core. A Core i9-9900K, in comparison, has a score of 6,320 and 31,404 in single and multi-core respectively.

Before jumping to conclusions, there are a few caveats to note. Firstly, we do not know whether the Ryzen 5 3600 in question has been overclocked or not. The listing itself does not seem to indicate any such thing but given the high scores, we think there should be some factor contributing for the same. 

Secondly, the benchmark listing says that the Ryzen 5 3600 was tested on Linux. For reasons not yet fully clear, it is a known fact that CPUs tend to hit higher frequencies in Linux compared to Windows and that reflects in benchmarks such as Geekbench. You will find much higher scores for the Core i9-9900K as well when you look at Linux Geekbench runs. 

So while not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison, look at it this way. A US$199 CPU on an X470 motherboard paired with fast DDR4-RAM could potentially give you a great single-thread performance that is not far off from much more pricier Intel offerings. We look forward to testing the 3rd generation Ryzen chips as soon as we get our hands on them so stay tuned.