AMD Ryzen 5 3600 Review: Why Is This Amazon's Best Selling CPU?
by Dr. Ian Cutress on May 18, 2020 9:00 AM ESTAMD Ryzen 5 3600 Conclusion
One of the major factors going into this review was the fact that the AMD Ryzen 5 3600 sits on top of the Amazon Best Sellers list in the US. Just to give you a sense of scale, here are the top 10 lists for each of the major Amazon regions:
| Amazon CPU Best Sellers | ||||
| AnandTech | US .com |
UK .co.uk |
EU .de |
AU .com.au |
| #1 | Ryzen 5 3600 | Ryzen 5 3600 | Ryzen 5 3600 | Ryzen 7 3700X |
| #2 | Ryzen 7 3700X | Ryzen 5 2600 | Ryzen 7 3700X | Ryzen 9 3900X |
| #3 | Ryzen 5 3600X | Ryzen 7 3700X | Ryzen 5 2600 | Ryzen 5 3600 |
| #4 | Ryzen 9 3900X | Ryzen 5 3600X | Ryzen 9 3900X | Ryzen 3 3200G |
| #5 | Ryzen 3 3200G | Ryzen 9 3900X | Core i7-9700K | USB-C Hub |
| #6 | Ryzen 5 2600 | Ryzen 7 3800X | Core i5-9600K | Pentium G4560 |
| #7 | Core i7-9700K | Core i7-9700K | Ryzen 7 3800X | Pentium G5400 |
| #8 | Core i5-9600K | Ryzen 3 3200G | CPU Cooler | Ryzen 5 2600 |
| #9 | Ryzen 7 3800X | Ryzen 7 2700X | Ryzen 5 3600X | Ryzen 7 2700X |
| #10 | Core i9-9900K | Core i5-9600K | Core i3-9100F | Ryzen 3 1200 |
As we can see, the AMD Ryzen 5 3600 comes #1 in the US, the UK, in Germany/EU, and third in Australia. In Australia the 3700X takes the top spot, and a USB-C hub takes the fifth spot. The highest spot on these charts for Intel is 5th in the European chart, and on three of the charts the top selling Intel processor is the i7-9700K.
It is worth noting here that these best seller charts don’t always tell the whole story. Sometimes some third party sellers post their hardware as completely new listings, which screws up the system, and it doesn’t take into account any pre-built machines or sales outside of Amazon. Where AMD’s Ryzen 5 3600 is the choice for system builders at home, businesses requiring pre-built systems is obviously a separate story.
We had earmarked the Core i5-9400F as the main competitor to the Ryzen 5 3600 due to the price banding, but none of the i5-9400F-like processors are even shown in the top 10, indicating just how popular the Ryzen 5 3600 is. Of course, with the Core i5-10500 on its way to be the main competition here, it will be interesting to see if it lands on this chart at all – not only for it to be competitive but for Intel to put enough stock into the market.
Having another flick through our benchmarks, it is clear why the Ryzen 5 3600 is a popular choice. It’s a great all-round chip that hits high marks in practically every benchmark, and can keep up with games at either low resolutions or high resolutions. Against some of the quad-core AMD parts it might be lacking a bit in single threaded performance, but that is part of the trade-off: having 6 cores and 12 threads helps everywhere where there is a threaded workload, such as transcoding or complex workflow. Compared to the similarly priced Intel chips, it’s not much of a contest.
The only critical element right now surrounding the Ryzen 5 3600 is the motherboard situation, and how users want to perceive their upgrade strategy. If the goal is to move up to a Ryzen 4000 CPU sometime next year, then users will either have to buy an expensive X570 motherboard or wait until the B550 motherboards come to market at some point in the future (date for on-shelf retail still not announced).
If users want a system today, then the B450 and X470 options are still available, and there is an upgrade path to the Ryzen 9 3950X. Moving from 6 cores to 16 cores isn’t anything to be sniffed at. Either that, or sell the motherboard and CPU as a combination when it is time to upgrade to Ryzen 4000.
There is no official word on Ryzen 4000 / Zen 3 launch yet. AMD has only said ‘Zen 3 by the end of the year’, which could be interpreted in a lot of ways. This means any Ryzen 5 3600 system built today is going to last for a long while to come.
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Sonik7x - Monday, May 18, 2020 - link
Would be nice to see 1440p benchmarks across all games, also would be nice to see a comparison against an i7-5930K running which is also a 6c/12T CPUET - Monday, May 18, 2020 - link
Would be even nicer to see newer games. Anandtech reviews seem to be stuck in 2018, both for games and for apps, and that makes them a lot less relevant a read than they could be.Dolda2000 - Monday, May 18, 2020 - link
You exaggerate. The point of a benchmark suite can't really be to contain the specific workload you're going to put on the CPU (since that's extremely unlikely to be the case anyway), but to be representative of typical workloads, and I think the application selection here is quite adequate for that. In comparison, I find it much more important to have more comparison data in the Bench database. There may be a stronger case to be made for games, but I find even that slightly doubtful.MASSAMKULABOX - Saturday, May 23, 2020 - link
Not only that , but slightly older games are much more stable and have most of the performance ironed out. New games are getting patches and downloads all the time, which often affect perfomance. I want to see "E" versions I.e 35/45wThreeDee912 - Monday, May 18, 2020 - link
They already mentioned in the 3300X review they'll be going back and adding in new games like Borderlands 3 and Gears Tactics: https://www.anandtech.com/show/15774/the-amd-ryzen...flyingpants265 - Monday, May 18, 2020 - link
I haven't used AnandTech benchmarks for years. They don't use enough CPUs/GPUs, they never include enough results from the previous generations, which is the most important thing when considering upgrades and $ value.Also, the "bench" tool does not include enough tests or hardware.
jabber - Tuesday, May 19, 2020 - link
Yeah nothing annoys me more than Tech Site benchmarks that only compare the new stuff to hardware than came out 6 months before it. If I see say a new GPU tested I want to see how it compares to my RX480 (that a lot of us will be looking to upgrade this year) than just a 5700XT.johnthacker - Tuesday, May 19, 2020 - link
Eh, nothing annoys me more than Tech Site benchmarks that only compare the new stuff to other new stuff. If I have an existing GPU or CPU and I'm not sure if it's worth it for me to upgrade or stick with what I've got, I want to see how something new compares to my existing hardware so I can know whether it's worth upgrading or whether I might as well wait.Pewzor - Monday, May 18, 2020 - link
I mean Gamer's Nexus uses old games as well.Crazyeyeskillah - Tuesday, May 19, 2020 - link
Just to make this crystal clear, the reason they HAVE to use older games is because all of the PAST data has been run using those games. Most review sites only get sample hardware for a week or less to run the tests then return it in the mail. You literally wouldn't have anything to compare the data to if you only ran tests on the latest and greatest games and benchmarks.When I see people making this complaint I understand that they are new to computers and just want them to understand that there is a reason why benchmarks are limited. Most hardware review sites don't make any money, or if they do, it's enough to pay one or MAYBE two staff members (poorly.) Ad revenue is garbage due to add blockers on all your browsers, and legitimate sites that don't spam blickbaity rumors as news are shutting down. Just look what happened to Hardocp.com, one of the last true honest review sites.
The idea that hardware sites all have stockpiles of every system imaginable and the thousands of hours it would take to constantly setup and run all the new games and benchmarks is pretty comical.