AMD Ryzen 5 3600 Review: Why Is This Amazon's Best Selling CPU?
by Dr. Ian Cutress on May 18, 2020 9:00 AM ESTGaming: Civilization 6 (DX12)
Originally penned by Sid Meier and his team, the Civ series of turn-based strategy games are a cult classic, and many an excuse for an all-nighter trying to get Gandhi to declare war on you due to an integer overflow. Truth be told I never actually played the first version, but every edition from the second to the sixth, including the fourth as voiced by the late Leonard Nimoy, it a game that is easy to pick up, but hard to master.
Benchmarking Civilization has always been somewhat of an oxymoron – for a turn based strategy game, the frame rate is not necessarily the important thing here and even in the right mood, something as low as 5 frames per second can be enough. With Civilization 6 however, Firaxis went hardcore on visual fidelity, trying to pull you into the game. As a result, Civilization can taxing on graphics and CPUs as we crank up the details, especially in DirectX 12.
Perhaps a more poignant benchmark would be during the late game, when in the older versions of Civilization it could take 20 minutes to cycle around the AI players before the human regained control. The new version of Civilization has an integrated ‘AI Benchmark’, although it is not currently part of our benchmark portfolio yet, due to technical reasons which we are trying to solve. Instead, we run the graphics test, which provides an example of a mid-game setup at our settings.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
| AnandTech | 1080p Ultra |
| Average FPS |  |
| 95th Percentile |  |
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steve wilson - Tuesday, May 19, 2020 - link
They do it to make it a fair test. You can easily compare results of other CPU's if you are using the same hardware in the rest of the PC.Meteor2 - Wednesday, May 20, 2020 - link
I was almost that person asking that question; thank you for pointing out a good answer.Irata - Tuesday, May 19, 2020 - link
It is interesting for the average $ 150- 200 CPU buyer since they most likely won‘t have anything close to a 2080ti in their PC.Personally, I also think all reviews should be done using the stock heatsink or alternatively add the aftermarket HSF‘s price to the CPU cost, at least in the low to mid range.
Spunjji - Tuesday, May 19, 2020 - link
How does that better help you evaluate the performance? All it does is tell you what you'd see if you spend $1200 on a GPU and then restrict yourself to last decade's favourite resolution. The differences you observe in that state don't translate to meaningful performance difference in practice.TheJian - Tuesday, May 19, 2020 - link
Scanned page titles, no OCing, crap benchmarks....Moving along.Spunjji - Tuesday, May 19, 2020 - link
We already know that there's not really any point in overclocking Ryzen. Why waste the time on repeating that?msroadkill612 - Tuesday, May 19, 2020 - link
Ian makes an important point imo - the 3600 has been the cheapest foot in the door for zen2. It happens to also be a very muscular 6 core.Folks are starting to get that its about balance, & the whole am4 zen ecosystem leaves Intel for dead.
A little mentioned thing, is intel must run NVME drives thru the chipset - yuk... thats not the same at all - its wasting a lot of what u paid for that boon of a resource.
watzupken - Tuesday, May 19, 2020 - link
Performance vs price is certainly the key reason for people to get the Ryzen 5 3600. At least for myself, I tend to get mid tier CPUs as I don't like to spend too much on a hardware. Historically, I would get Intel i5 consistently due to it price vs performance. I feel most people will be on this same boat where we look for best performance to price. In the case of AMD Ryzen 5 3600, it's got an outstanding value since it performs better than an Intel chip at the same price, and you can further overclock it to push performance. Intel chips at this price point means an OC locked chip.johnthacker - Tuesday, May 19, 2020 - link
So basically, as expected, the Ryzen 3 3300X is the 5 3600's equal on anything that's not embarrassingly parallel, but the 5 3600 is far superior on things like encoding, decoding, and compression that parallelize easily.Oxford Guy - Tuesday, May 19, 2020 - link
"AMD Ryzen 5 3600 Review: Why Is This Amazon's Best Selling CPU?"Lame headline. How about this:
"Stomped: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 Has No Intel Competition In Its Price Bracket"
My headline is more to the point.