AMD Ryzen 5 3600 CPU Review

Test System and Benchmarks

AMD Ryzen 5 3600 Test Bench

Intel Core i7-8700k Test Bench

The Ryzen 5 3600 is configured similarly to the setup when I reviewed the Ryzen 7 3700X and the Ryzen 7 3900X. The CPU is water cooled in a loop that features a 360mm radiator and the EKWB AMD Velocity water block.

For synthetic benchmarks, each benchmark was run on each system three times. Then we picked the best of the three results. The system was allowed to idle in between each benchmark for no less than 30 minutes. This gives the processor time to cool down a bit before the next test is performed. The ambient temperature is kept as close to 21°c, or 70°f as possible. We use both Core Temp and Hardware Monitor to record temperatures and CPUZ to validate clock speeds and voltages.

At the top of the charts, I put the AMD Ryzen 5 3600 in direct comparison with the Intel i7 8700K and the Ryzen 5 3600X as they closely match in configuration with the CPUs being 6 core/12 thread CPUs. The only hardware difference between the two systems is the CPU, motherboard, and water blocks.

Testing and Performance

AIDA64 ENGINEER

AIDA64 has a set of several 64-bit benchmarks to measure how fast the computer performs various data processing tasks and mathematical calculations. Multi-threaded memory and cache benchmarks are available to analyze system RAM bandwidth and latency. Benchmark pages of AIDA64 Extreme provide several methods to measure system performance. These benchmarks are synthetic, so their results show only the theoretical maximum performance of the system. The AIDA64 suite has various benchmarks for CPU, FPU, GPU, storage and memory testing.

As I would expect, the Ryzen 5 3600 and the Ryzen 5 3600X are extremely close in terms of memory performance with only 200 MHz separating them. Even compared to the older Intel i7-8700K performance is extremely close. The AMD CPUs suffer a write penalty based because the CCD to IO link is 32B per cycle for reads and 16B per cycle for writes vs 32B per cycle for both read and write operations.

In both the CPU and FPU test of Aidia 64, you can see the three CPUs at the top of the chart are all very close to each other in terms of performance. No CPU pulls ahead of the other. Closer still are the results of the two Ryzen 5 CPUs. This trend continues throughout the benchmark process.

Cinebench R20

Cinebench is a real-world cross-platform test suite that evaluates your computer’s hardware capabilities. Improvements to Cinebench Release 20 reflect the overall advancements to CPU and rendering technology in recent years, providing a more accurate measurement of Cinema 4D’s ability to take advantage of multiple CPU cores and modern processor features available to the average user.

The Ryzen 5 3600 shows strong performance in the Cinebence R20 test. The multi-core tests keep pace just behind the Ryzen 5 3600 with a score of 3630. Single-core performance is good as well coming in at 487 compared to the other 6-core CPUs on the chart.

POV-Ray 3.7

The Persistence of Vision Ray Tracer, or POV-Ray, is a ray-tracing program that generates images from a text-based scene description and is available for a variety of computer platforms. It was originally based on DKBTrace, written by David Kirk Buck and Aaron A. Collins for the Amiga computers. There are also influences from the earlier Polyray^[6] raytracer contributed by its author Alexander Enzmann. POV-Ray is free and open-source software with the source code available under the AGPLv3.

In POV-Ray, the Ryzen 5 3600 scores 3262.4 in the multi-threaded test and 459.87 on the single-threaded test. Compare that to 3327.93 and 469.35 on the Ryzen 5 3600X and 2919.91 and 486.92 on the Intel i7-8700K.