AMD Ryzen 5 3600X 6-Core, 12-Thread Unlocked Desktop Processor with Wraith Spire Cooler

This CPU is amazing. It is great at everything. It can game, multitask, stream, productivity, and more. It’s priced good enough that even if you just want it for general computing it’s still great. This thing comes pushed to the limit straight out of the box pretty much. Traditionally I overclock every CPU I buy but with this one AMD have pretty much pushed them to the max for us. Which is great because it’s plug n play! Mine with PBO and Thermal Limits set to max stays around 4.250ghz on all cores gaming under full load with 1 of the 6 cores boosting to 4.35-4.15ghz. So in a game 5 cores will be at 4.250 ghz and one core will always be around 4.35-4.15ghz with that 1 core alternating so they take turns. This gives great ipc and single threaded performance as well as multithreaded. This gives high FPS in games due to the strong single core performance than a 4.3ghz all core overclock gets. You can basically set PBO to max and TBU to max and your motherboard and system will boost it as high as it can. It’s amazing it’s literally drop it in and your good to go this time around. No overclocking needed. I have this CPU in the Asus Prime X570-Pro motherboard if anyone was curious. It was 260 dollar board so it’s pretty nice imo. So your numbers may be different than mine. For cooling I’m using a simple Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo in Push/Pull with twin fans. Keeps my CPU in the mid 30sC idle, in the 50sC in gaming rather it’s an hour or all day long. Under Prime 95 stress test it topped out at 76C then dropped back to 74C and stayed there. For a 35 dollar cooler pretty insane. I have great case air flow so if you do not do not expect these results. The best way to get more performance from your Ryzen CPU since it’s basically pushed to the max out of the box is via memory. You can look it up if you wish. Memory speed significantly effects your cpus performance at least in gaming. It was shown going from 2666mhz to 3600mhz memory speed in games was giving huge FPS increases. In almost all games 10-20 FPS increase with some games increasing as much as 30-40fps. So if you buy a Ryzen CPU for the love of god buy 3600mhz memory with it. I have 32GB of G.Skill Ripjaws in mine all running at 3600mhz and that’s using all 4 dimm slots 4x8GB sticks in duel channel mode. Fast memory paired with this CPU in a good motherboard means you don’t have to overclock or touch anything this time around and you get amazing performance in all regards. I have my 3600x and 3600mhz memory paired with a RTX 2070 Super that is overclocked really well and I am playing any games I want at 1440P maxed out getting 100+ FPS in pretty much everything. If you want a nice CPU for gaming, streaming, content creation, or anything else well you’re looking at one. At this point in time the Ryzen 3600XT is out now which is basically this exact CPU except it runs around 4.6ghz in the boosting alternative core and probably around 4.4 on the other 5 core. So you gain roughly about 200mhz over this 3600x by going with the XT. Rather that’s worth it well that’s up to you. At most the difference in FPS between the two might be 5 FPS at max. So just get whichever is the best deal. Even the Ryzen 3600 non X or non XT does very very similar in performance to the X and XT and is 150 dollars right now. Everything I said pretty much applies to all 3 CPUs they are just an amazing gaming chip.

I will admit, I was hesitant to buy an AMD CPU. The benchmarks put it competing with Intel CPUs that cost nearly twice as much, so even though I've used Intel since my very first build I decided to try it out. And this CPU cannot be beat for the price. If you are planning on buying a CPU for a gaming rig, BUY THIS CPU. It blows the tits clean off any other Intel core at this price point, and every game I have thrown at it hits the 144 FPS mark. Before I upgraded (admittedly I was due for an upgrade, I'd been abusing the crap out of my i5 4690k with ridiculous overclocks) I had trouble reaching that 144fps on a couple games, namely warframe, GTA5, and Monster Hunter World. After this CPU, they all hit that cap across the board.Power consumption is relatively low for how much work it does, and the boost clock has run for about 2 weeks now without any instability or crashing.The only thing you should look at is buying a better heat sink. While the one they include is certainly better than any stock heat sink I've ever used, testing Monster Hunter World for an hour got the temps up to 78° at max with it installed, usually hovering around the high 60s. While that's still technically a safe temperature... it's still a bit high for my tastes, especially since I'm tired of constantly keeping an eye on coretemp. Plus, the fan isn't the quietest thing in the world, and the settings I used had the fan hit full power at 67° which meant it was almost always running at full whack. So I threw an old coolermaster on and the same tests maxed out at 69° averaging about 60°, which is much better.My mantra used to be Intel for CPUs and AMD for GPUs, but I'm an AMD man across the board now. I planned on buying the i9 9900k, but a friend told me to look into this CPU instead. I think I owe my friend a drink or two now since he saved me $200+!Bear in mind, the computer I use this on is used almost exclusively for gaming. The fact that this CPU is only 6 cores for a newer model makes me think it was specifically designed with gaming in mind. I cannot speak for other applications that are CPU intensive, especially those that benefit greatly from multiple cores. But for every current gen game, even crappy ports like Monster Hunter, this CPU is top-notch quality for a mainstream price.