Final Thoughts
Last year when I took a look at the Ryzen 5 3600X I called it the mid-range king, does that hold true for the new Ryzen 5 5600X? I would say so! We see it beating out the Intel Core i5-10600K in all of our CPU tests. Not only in multi-core testing, but in single-core as well. One of the things that AMD wanted to do with the Ryzen 5000 series is increase single-core performance and they really made efforts to do so. In our testing we saw anywhere from a 16 to 19% increase in single-core performance over the previous generation. Multi-core performance got a nice boost as well in our tests we saw an increase anywhere from 12% to 17% depending on the test we ran. Even more impressive is that AMD is able to do this in the same 65W TDP.
One of the places where AMD fell a little behind Intel on the last generation was gaming. I’ve always said if you purely care about gaming and getting the most FPS Intel is the way to go. Well it looks like that is going to change. AMD has done a lot to compete in pure gaming performance. In our tests we saw the Ryzen 5 5600X outperform the Intel Core i5-10600K in all of our gaming tests except Borderlands 3. I think we are coming to the point where its an either/or on who to really recommend when it comes to gaming and it will really depend on which game is really optimized for each. Talking about gaming comparing the Ryzen 5 5600X to the previous Ryzen 5 3600X we see a very nice improvement in gaming performance. Besides Borderlands 3 we saw a gaming performance increase of 9-17% depending on the title. That is pretty impressive, and of course those numbers will increase if you are coming from a 2nd generation Ryzen processor.
Another thing we have to mention like we did when we reviewed the Ryzen 5 3600X is platform! Simply X570 and B550 motherboards support PCI-Express 4.0 and currently Intel Z490 motherboards do not. The big advantage of PCI-Express 4.0 is super-fast Gen4 NVMe solid state drives, which have been going down in price recently. Even if you don’t plan on buying a Gen4 NVMe SSD right away you are sort of future-proofing yourself going the X570 and B550 route.
When it comes to overclocking it is very much the same as what we saw on the last generation. Although, we were able to push the Ryzen 5 5600X much further than we were able to do with the Ryzen 5 3600X. We were able to achieve an all-core overclock of 4.8 GHz with a Vcore of 1.375V. Overclocking on Ryzen 5000 series processors is very easily if you are doing it in the BIOS of your motherboard or using AMD’s Ryzen Master software.
Right now you can pick up the Ryzen 5 5600X at our favorite online retailer for $299. That is a $50 increase over the Ryzen 5 3600X, but we feel it is warranted with the increased performance not only in CPU-specific tasks, but also gaming. Intel’s Core i5-10600K is priced at $267 right now and the Ryzen 5 5600X handily beat it in all of our tests (except Borderlands 3). With that I think spending the extra $30 is well worth getting the Ryzen 5 5600X.
Pros:
– 6-core, 12-thread
– Impressive performance increase in single-core and gaming
– Stayed within the same 65W TDP
– Price
– Great overclocking potential
– Still using the AM4 socket
– Ryzen Master software
Cons:
– None that I found
