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: Ashes Classic (DX12)
Seen as the holy child of DirectX12, Ashes of the Singularity (AoTS, or just Ashes) has been the first title to actively go explore as many of the DirectX12 features as it possibly can. Stardock, the developer behind the Nitrous engine which powers the game, has ensured that the real-time strategy title takes advantage of multiple cores and multiple graphics cards, in as many configurations as possible.
As a real-time strategy title, Ashes is all about responsiveness during both wide open shots but also concentrated battles. With DirectX12 at the helm, the ability to implement more draw calls per second allows the engine to work with substantial unit depth and effects that other RTS titles had to rely on combined draw calls to achieve, making some combined unit structures ultimately very rigid.
Stardock clearly understand the importance of an in-game benchmark, ensuring that such a tool was available and capable from day one, especially with all the additional DX12 features used and being able to characterize how they affected the title for the developer was important. The in-game benchmark performs a four minute fixed seed battle environment with a variety of shots, and outputs a vast amount of data to analyze.
For our benchmark, we run Ashes Classic: an older version of the game before the Escalation update. The reason for this is that this is easier to automate, without a splash screen, but still has a strong visual fidelity to test.
Ashes has dropdown options for MSAA, Light Quality, Object Quality, Shading Samples, Shadow Quality, Textures, and separate options for the terrain. There are several presents, from Very Low to Extreme: we run our benchmarks at the above settings, and take the frame-time output for our average and percentile numbers.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
| AnandTech | IGP | Low | Medium | High |
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| 95th Percentile |  |
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jabber - Tuesday, May 19, 2020 - link
I just wish he's cut that damn awful hair, put it in a ponytail or use some conditioner on it at least. The constant hair tucking....aarrghghhhhhhhhhhburnte - Monday, May 18, 2020 - link
I have a 3600X, not the 3600, and I can throw everything at it in 1440p. Once the perf patches came out for Fallen Order and the drivers for my RTX 2070, Fallen Order runs like butter. Shadow of the Tomb Raider never dipped below 90fps, and most of the time tops out my monitor's 144hz refresh rate, all running at 1440p.evilspoons - Monday, May 18, 2020 - link
I mean, you've got 1080p and 4K results already and as the resolution goes up the CPU is less important than the GPU. 1920x1080 vs 2560x1440 vs 3840x2160, the results are basically just going to be split down the middle.PeterCollier - Monday, May 18, 2020 - link
It's interesting that in Australia, the Ryzen 7, instead of the 5, is the most popular. You would think that the VAT incentives the less expensive parts. Is electricity unusually cheap down under? Or is the 7 the best selling part because winter is coming to the southern hemisphere, and users needed upgrades from Preshott?Spunjji - Monday, May 18, 2020 - link
Could be that once you've saved up the silly amount of money needed for an upgrade there, stretching a little further to the 3700X just seems to make sense?PixyMisa - Monday, May 18, 2020 - link
Yeah, the exchange rate is brutal right now so it makes sense to try to make your system last an extra year. I have two Ryzen 1700 systems and I'm hoping to hold onto them until DDR5 arrives.tmr3 - Monday, May 18, 2020 - link
Generally speaking, Amazon isn't really *the* go-to place for PC hardware shopping in Australia. We tend to rely more on established PC-centric retailers like PCCaseGear, Scorptec, Mwave, Centre Com, PLE and a few others depending on where in Australia you live. It's worth considering that Amazon has only been available as an AU website for around 2.5 years now, and depending on where you look, stock for certain products is often spottily available, way overpriced through third-party sellers only, or clearly international stock being sold as a "local" listing.On one of those retailer sites (Scorptec in this case) that has the option to list products by popularity, of the AM4 processors, the Ryzen 5 3600 takes top spot, followed by the Ryzen 5 1600 AF, the Ryzen 7 3700X, and then the Ryzen 9 3900X and Ryzen 5 2600. For their Intel processor listings, the Core i7-9700K is followed by two "value bundles" featuring the Core i5-9400 and Core i3-8100, then it's the Core i7-9700F and the Core i9-9900K. Unfortunately, they don't offer a combined view so we can't compare overall popularity.
Gigaplex - Monday, May 18, 2020 - link
Australian winter isn't that cold. I think the Amazon ranking is skewed because we generally shop elsewhere.boozed - Wednesday, May 20, 2020 - link
Heard of the Core i9?ingwe - Monday, May 18, 2020 - link
Wow these are good results for AMD. Looks like this might have to be my next build.