AMD Ryzen 5 3600 Review: Why Is This Amazon's Best Selling CPU? (opens in new tab)

And this is hardware you can order today and have running under your desk by the end of the week.

This is such a welcome change from the crypto days with GPUs in short supplies and at very high prices, and stagnant Intel CPU performance!

It's remarkable how not only the first but also #3, #5, #6 positions are some Ryzen 5 ?600? CPU. The 2600X is the only that is currently lower at #12. Also remarkable how utterly absent Intel is from this chart. The i3 9100F managed to break into #2 and then a Pentium Gold G5400 at #15 but both of these are sub-$75 parts while most AMD parts are significantly more expensive likely bringing more profit to AMD. Usually price per performance goes sharply down with performance, it doesn't scale linearly but remarkably a $405 processor from AMD is in the top 10, the 3900X. Power-performance wise also AMD is the killer, https://www.cpubenchmark.net/power_performance.html the new 15W TDP AMD 5/7 4xxxU CPUs are the first four while most Intel chips at the top of the chart are in 4.5-7W territory. If you look for ordinary socketed chips, you will find the Ryzen 3900, the Intel 9900T (which is a special 35W part), the 3950X and astonishingly the EPYC 7702 at 200W beating the Intel Core i3-1005G1 which is a 15W part on the latest Intel node at 10nm ... that's just embarassing.

Some days ago I checked https://opendata.blender.org/ and noticed that the RTX 2060, RTX 2060 Super and RTX 2070 are all equal when it comes to performance in the Blender benchmark.

Also the RTX 2070 Super might be the cheapest performance card at the moment.

Charts like these can save you a lot of money. But it will depend on the usage of course.

Yes, 1080p at 60fps which is still the most popular resolution out there according to the Steam Hardware Survey.

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...

I wonder why the GTX 1080 isn't in the videobenchmark all-time value chart.

I'm surprised the 1650 super is ~ 30% cheaper than the 1660 super but it looks like current prices pretty accurately reflect original MSRPs

* https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/evga-nvidia-geforce-gtx...

vs.

* https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia-gtx_1650-super-t...

Does anyone know if the GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER, combined with a 3600x, is able to power a 4k monitor at 60hz?

Note: this is NOT for gaming. Just everyday workflow and dev environments in 4k, 60hz.

I've had a 2600 for a year or two. I was looking to see what I'd gain from an upgrade to the 3600..Interesting to see the new 2600s still compete in the value department...now that their prices has been reduced by about $50.

When I was building a workstation in late 2018, it was a close match for price to performance, even after getting a 50% discount on Intel HDET processors from a friend! I'm happy to see AMD killing it in the CPU space.

With the proviso that the perf/$ approach works less well on GPUs cause you need to match that with what type of screen res & refresh you want to drive (if gaming I guess).

..which might easily land you in 2060/2070 territory.

Wow, looking at the XY scatter graph there shows a pretty stark contrast.

Interesting. AMD dominates the entire top 10 of that list.

i wish there was also a column for Watts/CPU Mark, this matters to me and i'm sure AMD kills it here, too.

That's roughly equivalent to Cinebench points per dollar, which is unrelated to gaming performance, if you want that. Doesn't mean the 3600 is bad, but it does mean that these kinds of synthetic benchmarks tell you very little about gaming performance, which is less about the speed of the cores themselves but rather memory latency, something all current Ryzen CPUs are architecturally very bad at (20-50 % slower than Intel).

>> I just wish I could buy a Zen 2 chip in a laptop that doesn't look like it was made for a fourteen year old (no offense to any fourteen year olds)

I just wish I could buy a decent motherboard that doesn't look like a 14yo's first attempt at drawing an f-35. My current rig does this weird glowing thing at night when it is supposed to be off. For my next machine I would honestly pay more to NOT have RGB support.

> i7-6700k because single core performance has remained relatively flat

Well, it hasn't improved tremendously, but it hasn't remained flat. You can get around 20% more in single core performance, if it's so important to you.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks

https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/cpu_benchmark-cinebench_r15_si...

Lack of "acceptable high end" Zen 2 laptops is my gripe too. From what I understand, it is following 2 reasons;

1. Intel/nVidia Contracts have OEMs their hands tied (which explains capped GPU in most Zen 2 laptops).

2. Lack of widespread Thunderbolt 3 support on AMD.

While I'm fully bought on reason 1., reason 2. is still hard to digest as one can still ship laptop with USB-C port supporting PD and DisplayPort (w/ alternate mode) and call it a day, and most users won't mind. I hope Zen 3 causes the power shift on laptops.

I upgraded to a 3600X. I use an 8th gen 6 core chip at work. This 3600X murders the Intel daily. The speed is insane. At work I run off an SSD with Optane acceleration, my home machines with the 3600X and NVME just kills my work machine, which itself is no slouch. I've never been so impressed with a brand new machine, and I've been building them since 1990.

I don't know what's wrong with me, but I want to atleast buy a 1400€ 24core 3960x Threadripper, because of the insane upgradability.

The idea that in 2-3 years i could just buy a used 3970 or even a 3990 to more than double the core count is amazing to me, and knowing that prohibits me from having my mind blown by the insane value of the smaller Ryzens.

Pro tip: sell your used 6700k on ebay. Somewhere, someone can put it to good use, and judging by the latest closed deals on this model, you can easily sell it for something like $225.

> I just wish I could buy a Zen 2 chip in a laptop that doesn't look like it was made for a fourteen year old (no offense to any fourteen year olds). I heard someone say the lack of 4k and more professional style laptops could be Intel back-channel fuckery,

Lenovo just released a couple ThinkPads peered by AMD Ryzen 7 Pro CPUs: T495, T495s and X395. They don’t have 4K screens though.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/05/lenovo-adds-amd-ryze...

But what are you going to do that your 6700K couldn’t do already? It’s only slightly faster in aI by le threaded. More cores, great, if you’re rendering video or 3D or compiling all day.

I too was rocking the Skylake series (6600K for me though). However, I upgraded for two reasons - I went to the 3700X for twice as many cores, and the 6th gen Intel series can’t keep up with h265 like 7th gen plus.

> Turns out it was the CPU and how crappy AMD handle C-states that save energy

From my experience, Intel is no better.

I have a 4 year old laptop with an Intel CPU that has the same problem, it was never fixed by Intel. [see EDIT]

For the first 3 years of use I just accepted the fact that my laptop would randomly freeze and I would have to reboot it.

One day, I got sick of it and started digging into forums until I found a way to avoid the specific c-state (by modifying kernel boot parameters) that caused the issue.

EDIT: Apparently, it's getting fixed now. Just 5 years late, issue was reported in 2015 https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=109051

I’ve just been through this exact thing with a 3200G on Ubuntu 19 and 20. Took months to disgnose. Extremely painful. Ended up replacing the RAM and motherboard before finally determining the problem was with the CPU. Disabling C-states helped but didn’t resolve the issue. Tried a bunch of other things too, none of which ultimately worked.

In the end I switched to a 3700X; so far the problem hasn’t reoccurred. No doubt it will now that I’ve posted about it (fool me twice, shame on me).

Surprisingly, the solution for the first gen Ryzens / 1600AFs is not allowing the power supply idle voltage to go into low power mode. Check your BIOS for it.

It turns out many PSUs don't handle low CPU power states well, and disabling C6 just prevents the CPU from being able to idle (and consequently, boost) properly. I've had perfect uptime with my 1600AF in a storage node since discovering this.

All my computers were Intel based except for one. It was an Athlon64 X2 from ~2006 and I also felt something was wrong when running Linux. Random crashes happened quite often, I never got to know the cause. Performance was not amazing either, despite my previous computer being 4 years older.

I've never had a problem running Intel based systems with Linux. So, even though everybody's talking about how good AMD is right now, and why you should buy one for your next rig, and how good are AMD graphic cards with open drivers instead of the nVidia binary blobs... I sincerely don't see any reason to ditch what has been working OK and make the switch when preparing a new build. Should I?

At Ryzen's launch mobo vendors weren't investing a lot into the platform because they were largely burned by previous AMD generations that failed to compete with Intel.

It wasn't until Ryzen 2000 / 3000 in particular that board vendors took the AMD stack seriously again.

I remember at release getting ram working on Zen 1 was a nightmare. Nowadays you can throw almost any stick to 3733mhz on Zen 2 no problem.

My 1800X did the same thing. I was able to RMA it and get a replacement that worked fine. It's only the early chips that had this issue.

AFAIK this goes back to the AMD graphics driver; I just built my wife a Ryzen 3200G / B450 system and she has had a couple of spontaneous reboots too. I did burn in using an old AMD 6970 card instead of the built in graphics and it did fine with that for me; but of course that card wont run the games she wants so we're hoping for a fix too.

Having a TR 2970WX at work with the same issue. You must just disable the lower C-states, freezing the machine when coming up from sleep.

At home I've had a 3950x now for about six months and no such issues with the CPU at all. It just works and runs nicely. No freezes, no problems.

I have seen this when running Linux desktop on older AMD CPUs.

I just built a new machine around this CPU back in March too. I built a new machine specifically for playing Half-Life: Alyx, and couldn't be happier with this CPU.

My thermals were pretty great with the stock CPU cooler, but I ended up going with a Noctua NH-U14S which might be a little overkill, but when playing Half-Life: Alyx, I stay between 45-60c which seems pretty good to me. The game runs at a perfect framerate on High settings with the AMD 5700XT, 32GB of DDR4 RAM on the Vive Pro.

I may end up upgrading to a Ryzen 7 4XXX series when they come out, but for now, this CPU is performing great. Def best bang for your buck.

I built a new PC around one just this weekend. Turned out I'd forgotten to plug in the CPU cooler fan and it ran great. Big cooler though

I built a new system with one of these last December, and it has been a great experience for everything I have thrown at it. I wasn't sure whether I'd stick with it or upgrade later - I mainly got it just to "get into" the Ryzen ecosystem, as this article suggests many do - but so far I see absolutely no reason for anything more.

One thing I didn't realize at the time is that the 3000 series is "end of the line" for B450 motherboards, which should be a real consideration for anybody eyeing a new system with this CPU now. As this article suggests it leaves you in an awkward spot. I opted to upgrade there to a X570, but only barely; a lucky decision, as it turns out!

> It has also some really fantastic thermals

Granted my case doesn't have the best airflow (NZXT h210i), I was getting pretty high CPU temps with the stock cooler. Averaging mid to uppers 80s during gaming, High 50s idle.

I went ahead and ordered a Noctua cooler which should be coming today actually. Hoping it helps.

IntelliJ stuff is usually slow (I like smaller form factor machines). Finally with the 3600 performance is at least reasonable and not annoying.

It took forever to get bundled, but you can get Lenovo and I think HP prebuilt machines for this as well - for work I don't like handbuilding a machine.

I don't have first hand experience with higher spec build on the single CCD Zen 2 chips, but the dual CCD chips are not particularly good in terms of thermals. Only the very best of air coolers can handle them, and are not particularly quiet doing so. Idle CPU power consumption is unimpressive and at 50-70 W exceeds what older systems achieved for the entire system.

Which case (and GPU) did you go with?

> Intel CPU market is behind after many years. Long live AMD design + Taiwan manufacturing.

Except Intel still delivers better and more consistent gaming performance largely based on better overall architecture (L3, IMC and what connects these).

Both Intel and AMD are billion-dollar publicly traded companies. I don't get why people would fanboy either of them. I don't want AMD to win, because then they are going to abuse their position, just like Intel did. Conversely, I don't want Intel to win. Two players in a market is already problematic; trying for one player is just suicidal.

Ended up with a 3700x. They seem to run at the very edge of their thermals straight out of the box though.

I tried a light touch of overclocking and got absolutely nowhere. (Stock cooler)

Running that close to the edge is an achievement in itself though I guess

>so if you're going to be compiling code it's totally worth it.

This always gets brought up as a use case, but how many people are building non-trivial codebases where compile times matter? If build times are under 5s, near perfect parallelization only nets you a 1.25s gain between 3700x and 3600.

That's completely independent of the processor. Nothing blocks you from running a Nvidia gpu with an AMD processor.

You can very easily pair an AMD CPU and an Nvidia GPU.

>The standard on the software side is CUDA..which is nvidia only.

I was under the impression that AMD gpus had achieved some modest level of compatibility with the major frameworks?

Could you expand on this?

I'm looking to gift a laptop that's good for ML stuff. What features should I be looking at?

Any specific recommendations?

I have an 3900x and in gaming it easily hits 80-90C. In 100% load it gets 97C and throttles. I switched to Noctua D15 and it does not go past 70 on full loa dand 60 on gaming. Higly recommend it, its so silent.

I find the included cooler for the 3600 not so great. I bought one the month it came out, and was hitting pretty high temps when creating h264 using only CPU. I tried applying paste before buying a better cooler. I think 3600x and up have much better coolers.

Thermalright coolers are sleepers; not well known, but superb performance and price-performance ratio far superior to anything else. You can basically get something that gets close to a 100 € Noctua NH-D15 for less than half the price.

Especially in super-budget builds. The extra $30 that you save by getting a reasonably good cooler with your CPU versus needing to replace the stock Intel one can be huge for someone building in the $500 range.

For Threadripper, all CPUs and motherboards are fully validated for ECC. (AMD requires Threadripper motherboards to implement ECC.)

It's only Ryzen where the CPUs support ECC, but AMD doesn't require AM4 socket motherboards to implement it. (And you have to verify that a board advertising ECC actually implements ECC and doesn't just accept ECC modules.)

I'm in the same situation, looking to get a new workstation and want ECC. Performance-wise, I would be good with a 3900x or 3950x. But PCIe lanes and good IOMMU separation are also requirements for me, so it looks like I have to go Threadripper. I'm disappointed that there's no 16 core Threadripper that has the other benefits of a HEDT platform for people who don't need zillions of cores. The current generation motherboards are also disappointing in that they max out at 4 PCIe slots. Apparently this is because PCIe 4.0 is still rather expensive at the moment.

AFAIK The Ryzen/Threadripper CPUs are all support ECC perfectly fine. Where things get shady are with motherboards that advertise support but don't quite do it right. Make sure you get a reputable motherboard and you should be fine.

Asus has an X570 with supported ECC don't remember the exact middl model name, but it had WS in the name.

I do wish memtest86 had a rowhammer style test, as that should tell if ECC is working

Yes, they call them APUs

https://www.amd.com/en/processors/athlon-and-a-series

An 8-core zen 2 APU is expected

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-ryzen-7-4700g-desktop-...

Yeah, apparently the 4700G[1] has already been spotted in benchmarks. Basically their 8-core ZEN2 APU.

[1] https://videocardz.com/newz/amd-ryzen-7-4700g-8-core-apu-pic...

Yes, look for CPU models suffixed with “G”. Unfortunately typically only available on the lower-tier models.

Ryzen 3/5 have variants with integrated GPU:

https://www.pcworld.com/article/3402056/amds-new-ryzen-3000-...

Most people don't buy new processors every year, and pre-built machines (especially laptops) are slower to switch from Intel. Slow adaptation is part product lifecycle (laptop lead time is on the order of a year) and part customer demand: Non-enthusiasts consumers still want their i7, and businesses will often have requirements for Intel specifically, and will have to work to change that, if anyone internal even cares to.

Because the DIY market is reletively small. Intel still has huge sway with OEM's (and mindshare with consumers). It's difficult for AMD to overcome that even with a better product

Inertia, or lack of real reason to upgrade. Personally I'm still on a CPU from 2013(Intel Core i5-4570S). Havent really felt the need to upgrade. And pretty happy that I went with 16GB ram back then, since its still enough for me today(browsing/light gaming/coding). I've probably spent 10 times what that CPU cost on SSDs since then, so its not a cost issue for me. And more recently a Geforce 1070 TI. I've been thinking about upgrading, but I really need to see significant IPC lift to bother. So maybe a Zen3 or Intel next-gen sometime in 2021. If they manage to raise IPC.

I'm in the same boat with a 3700x. I'm pretty sure the 3950x will be available at a good enough price that I jump to that before needing a motherboard upgrade.

3300x won't work on anything lower than b5xx, afaik.

I built my first gaming computer two years ago and have been ravenously following the scene ever since. In my opinion, AMD is the best price for value in both single and multithreaded workloads, and becomes only slightly outclassed in single threaded workloads at the extreme high end ie 9900k+ models. AMD seems to be particularly good in high end multithreaded workloads like graphics processing.

It’s important to note most CPU benchmarks are utter trash and many are on the payrolls of intel including CPU benchmark.net (thanks google for granting them incredible SEO).

My current build is still an 8700k but my next will most likely be AMD for a mostly gaming workload.

It's more than price for performance. It's also a very high absolute performance. Especially in games, where something like a Threadripper processor is not faster.