The AMD Ryzen 5 5600X is the most affordable of the Zen 3 family and comes hot on the heels of our Ryzen 9 5900X and Ryzen 7 5800X reviews. If there’s one serious criticism of AMD’s Zen 3 so far, it’s that the chips are a bit on the pricey side.
This is less of a problem at the high-end, where time is money and high performance can claw back time, but as you head down the stack and focus more on gaming, the payoff needs to be more immediate.
Up till now, Intel had been crowned the gaming champion on the CPU front but gone are those days as AMD has been hailed the new gaming champion.
The new Ryzen 5 5600X beats Intel’s Core i9-10900K in games, and when all 6 cores are clocked at 4.6GHz, the processors are just inches apart from the last-gen Core i7-10700K in general performance.
The $299 (₹21960) AMD Ryzen 5 5600X slots perfectly into the market for midrange gaming-focused CPUs, and brings with it the best balance of core count and cost in the company’s latest launch of Zen 3-based processors.
The Ryzen 5 5600X set records in some of our gaming results, as well as being one of the best values in price-to-performance that AMD offers in 2020.
Although it lacks the integrated graphics that some buyers in the midrange might be looking for, that’s a small ding on an otherwise stellar showing for this Editors’ Choice pick among gaming CPUs, alongside the also-great budget-model Ryzen 3 3300X.
AMD Ryzen 5 5600X Specifications:
The Ryzen 5 5600X is a six-core, 12-thread processor with a base clock of 3.7GHz and a max boost of 4.6GHz.
It’s built up of a single core complex that has 32MB of L3 cache to call its own, and the same I/O die that can be found in Zen 2.
The 5600X has a 65W TDP and limits itself to drawing 76W from the socket. That’s impressively low for a modern CPU and means that there is the potential for some overclocking shenanigans if that’s your thing. This is an unlocked chip by the way, although you’re going to need a decent cooler to really exploit this fact.
The AMD official supports up to 3,200MHz DDR4 RAM, although you’ll be able to run much faster memory without issue. The Infinity Fabric runs at 1,800MHz by default, so pairing it with 3,600MHz DDR4 makes sense.
There is the potential for a faster Infinity Clock (FCLK) through BIOS updates in the future as well, although AMD isn’t guaranteeing this at launch.
The Ryzen 5 5600X is a six-core shredder that smooths over the last of the few flaws we saw from Zen 2 and the Ryzen 5 3600X, and it solidifies AMD as the premier desktop CPU manufacturer of 2020 in every way.
If you’re just looking to game, the Ryzen 5 5600X offers up record-setting value in a way that only AMD can close out 2020.
