Amd Ryzen 5 3600x Review
When AMD’s Ryzen 5 CPUs first burst onto the scene, I was happy to find that those chips hung right with Intel’s latest-and-greatest midrange parts for smooth gaming performance. I wasn’t able to complete our productivity testing before that NDA lift, though, and the intervening couple of months or so has been a bit rough for yours truly outside of the TR labs. Those clouds are behind me, though, and I’m happy to be able to share the second half of our Ryzen 5 results now. AMD has struggled for years to keep pace with its rival Intel, particularly in the mobile processor space. The company has hyped the new Ryzen chips as a return to providing a competitive alternative for the desktop computing market.
Ian is an independent writer based in Israel who has never met a tech subject he didn’t like. He primarily covers Windows, PC and gaming hardware, video and music streaming services, social networks, and browsers. When he’s not covering the news he’s working on how-to tips for PC users, or tuning his eGPU setup. AMD retains the crown for the best overall mid-range processor with the Ryzen X, offering an incredible amount of performance with the six core and12 thread configuration. This CPU is well worth considering for your next PC build, especially if you plan on doing a little gaming and productivity. The temperature results don’t sound amazing, but bear in mind this is the stock cooler that AMD ships with the CPU for free.
Effective speed is adjusted by current prices to yield a value for money rating. Our calculated values are checked against thousands of individual user ratings. The customizable table below combines these factors to bring you the definitive list of top CPUs.
Intel’s chip scored a little higher on a couple of tests that didn’t require much graphics might, but the overall takeaway is that AMD’s mobile processors are now as good if not better than Intel’s. To see which processors reign supreme, we got ahold of two nearly identical HP Envy x360 2-in-1s — one with Ryzen 5 and one with Intel Core i5 — and put them through our own set of tests. Overall, the Ryzen Mobile-powered laptop impressed us by getting much-higher graphics scores than its competitor. You see in AMD Zen 2 processors, each Compute Die had two Core Complexes , which each had 4 cores and 16MB of L3 cache. This means in single-core workloads, the core would only have direct access to 16MB of cache, and would have to reach outside of the CCX if more was needed. With Zen 3, however, each CCX now has 8 cores and 32MB of L3 cache, so the amount of cache that each individual core has direct access to has doubled.
The integrated dual-channel memory controller supports up to DDR memory. As the features of the Picasso APUs are the same compared to the Raven Ridge predecessors, we point to ourRaven Ridge launch article. At least from the Linux experience on the IdeaPad 3 15 using Ubuntu 21.04 with the Linux 5.11 kernel, it’s been working out fine.
Up until 2017, the Intel Core i7 was Intel’s fastest line of processors until the Intel Core i9 was released. At the time of writing, the Intel i7 range features processors that contain up to 8 cores, with a default clock speed of around 3.6GHz on average. This makes the Intel i7 range a favorite for gamers, PC builders, and content creators. With the gtx 1080 8gb000 CPUs, AMD has finally dethroned Intel when it comes to raw gaming performance.
Eight cores and 16 threads make easy work of most tasks thrown at the CPU, and it’s unlocked for additional headroom should you have adequate cooling. Much like the Core i7 Intel processors, the Ryzen 7 family may be overkill for most people, but it allows for advanced computing at a somewhat affordable price point. If you happen to have a capable GPU, you may find some benefit in picking up a Ryzen 7 CPU.
Even for live-streaming, the OBS crew recommends CPU-encoding because it simply has the best quality-per-bitrate at low bitrates. I’d expect that the first APUs will be aimed at the lucrative laptop market. Because LuxMark uses OpenCL, we can use it to test both GPU and CPU performance, and to see how these different types of processors work together. We used the Intel OpenCL runtime for all of the CPUs at hand, since it delivers the best performance under LuxMark for x86 CPUs of all types in our experience. Blender is a widely-used, open-source 3D modeling and rendering application.