AMD 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.

Gaming: F1 2018
Comments Locked

114 Comments

View All Comments

  • 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.

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now