AMD CPUS Ryzen 5 3600 vs R5 2600
expensive 3rd-gen processor (R9 3900X) compared to the Core i9-9900K, the world's best gaming CPU. In short, the Ryzen 5 3600 proved to be the best value option for gamers, more often than not matching the Ryzen 9 3900X. Using an RTX 2080 Ti with medium quality settings at 1080p, the affordable Ryzen was just 14% slower on average when compared to the 9900K.
However with a more reasonable GPU such as the $350 Radeon RX 5700 at 1440p with ultra quality settings, the Ryzen 5 processor was just 4% slower than the 9900K, while averaging over 120 fps.
Since then we’ve seen our fair share of new CPUs and other hardware that had to get reviewed and tested, but we've been sitting for weeks on similar scaling results and data comparing the excellent Ryzen 5 3600 against its predecessor, the Ryzen 5 2600 which is to this day a great value CPU option.
Gamers asking if they should spend ~$70 more on the R5 3600, or just get the 2600, this is the article for you. It was time to get these results out.
For testing, both AMD CPUs were paired with G.Skill DDR4-3200 CL14 memory and the Corsair H115i Pro cooler. Auto overclocking features such as MCE or PBO were disabled and the memory was not tuned, just XMP loaded. In other words, we're looking at out of the box performance with a quality all-in-one cooler and low latency memory. Let’s get into the results.
Benchmarks
Starting with Assassin’s Creed Odyssey at 1080p using medium quality settings, at the top of the graph we have the RTX 2080 Ti and here we see the 3600 is up to 28% faster than the 2600.
That’s a big performance jump and those with high refresh rate monitors will certainly notice this improvement. However, if you’re using a $500 graphics card with these $200 (or less) CPUs, then the margins are far less extreme. Here the 3600 was just 13% faster when comparing the average frame rate while the 1% low performance was almost identical.
With more mainstream GPUs, like the $350 Radeon RX 5700, the 3600 is just 8% faster. Finally for those using an RX 580 or a GPU of roughly equivalent performance, there’s virtually no difference between the 2600 and 3600 under these test conditions.
This will also of course be true of anyone using a GPU that’s slower than the RX 580.
Now if we change the quality preset from medium to ultra high, things change quite a bit and this is a more appropriate quality setting for those using an RTX 2080 Ti, especially at just 1080p. Here we see virtually no difference in performance between the 2600 and 3600 using the 2080 Ti, in fact the 2600 was just a few frames slower than the 9900K in this test scenario.
It’s a similar story with the RTX 2070 Super and RX 5700. At most the Ryzen R5 2600 was 3 fps slower than the 3600, delivering identical performance. Naturally we'll see the same result with the RX 580 and with slower GPUs as well.
Jumping to 1440p using medium quality settings changes the picture from what we saw at 1080p. Previously, the 3600 was up to 28% faster than the 2600, here it’s just 7% faster with the 2080 Ti.
Similar margins are seen when testing with the RTX 2070 Super and RX 5700, while we see virtually no performance difference with the RX 580.
