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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PeachNCream - Monday, May 18, 2020 - link
Anandtech spends a lot of time on gaming and on desktop PCs that are not representative of where and how people now accomplish compute tasks. They do spend a little time on mobile phones and that nets part of the market, but only at the pricey end of cellular handsets. Lower cost mobile for the masses and work-a-day PCs and laptops generally get a cursory acknowledgement once in a great while which is disappointing because there is a big chunk of the market that gets disregarded. IIRC, AT didn't even get around to reviewing the lower tiers of discrete GPUs in the past, effectively ignoring that chunk of the market until long after release and only if said lower end hardware happened to be in a system they ended up getting. They do not seem to actively seek out such components, sadly enough.whatthe123 - Monday, May 18, 2020 - link
AI/tensorflow runs so much faster even on mid tier GPUs that trying to argue CPUs are relevant is completely out of touch. No academic in their right mind is looking for a bang-for-buck CPU to train models, it would be an absurd waste of time.wolfesteinabhi - Tuesday, May 19, 2020 - link
well ..games also run on GPU ...so why bother benchmarking CPU's with them? ... same reason why anyone would want to look at other workflows .. i said tensor flow as just one of the examples(maybe not the best example) ..but more of such "work" or "development" oriented benchmarks.pashhtk27 - Thursday, May 21, 2020 - link
Or there should be proper support libraries for the integrated graphics to run tensor calculations. That would make GPU-less AI development machines a lot more cost effective. AMD and Intel are both working on this but it'll be hard to get around Nvidia's monopoly of AI computing. Free cloud compute services like colab have several problems and others are very cost prohibitive for students. And sometimes you just need to have a local system capable of loading and predicting. As a student, I think it would significantly lower the entry threshold if their cost effective laptops could run simple models and get output.We can talk about AI benchmarks then.
Gigaplex - Monday, May 18, 2020 - link
As a developer I just use whatever my company gives me. I wouldn't be shopping for consumer CPUs for work purposes.wolfesteinabhi - Tuesday, May 19, 2020 - link
not all developers are paid by their companies or make money with what they develop ... some are hobbyists and some do it as their "side" activities and with their own money at home apart from what they do at work with big guns!.mikato - Sunday, May 24, 2020 - link
As a developer, I built my own new computer at work and got to pick everything within budget.Achaios - Monday, May 18, 2020 - link
"Every so often there comes a processor that captures the market. "This used to be Sandy Bridge I5-2500K, all time best seller.
Oh, how the Mighty Chipzilla has fallen.
mikelward - Monday, May 18, 2020 - link
My current PC is a 2500K. My next one will be a 3600.Spunjji - Tuesday, May 19, 2020 - link
Sandy was an absolute knockout. Most of the development thereafter was aimed at sticking similarly powerful CPUs in sleeker packages rather than increasing desktop performance, and while I feel like Intel deserve more credit for some things than they get (e.g. the leap in mobile power/performance that can from Haswell) they really shit the bed on 10nm and responding to Ryzen.