Every so often there comes a processor that captures the market. It ends up being that right combination of price, cores, frequency, performance, features and compatibility when added to the right sort of motherboard that makes it fly off the shelves. The main CPU this cycle seems to be the Ryzen 5 3600, offering six high-performance Zen 2 cores and 24 lanes of PCIe 4.0 for only $199. It currently sits at #1 on the Amazon best seller list, so we put one through the paces just to see if the hype was actually real.

At $199, the AMD Ryzen 5 3600 has been one the cheapest way to get ahold of AMD’s latest Zen2 microarchitecture. In our reviews of the lead generation Ryzen products, as well as Zen2 on Threadripper, Zen2 in EPYC, and Zen2 in Renoir, this microarchitecture is pushing new performance boundaries clock-for-clock against Intel’s other desktop offerings. In fact, until the latest launch of the Ryzen 3 line of processors, the Ryzen 5 was the cheapest Zen 2 processor on the market.

(On 5/18, Amazon's price was down to $189. Newegg was $172, but sold out).

 

Competition

With six cores and twelve threads, the comparative Intel options vary between something like the Core i7-9600KF with six cores and no hyperthreading, or to the i7-9700KF with eight cores and no hyperthreading. The downside is that both of these processors are more expensive: where the Ryzen 5 3600 is $199, the i5-9600KF is $263 and the i7-9700KF is $385. Frequencies between the three are competitive, however the AMD has a TDP of 65 W, compared to 95 W, and it comes with DDR4-3200 support with 24 lanes of PCIe 4.0, rather than DDR4-2666 and 16 lanes of PCIe 3.0.

AMD Ryzen 5 3600 vs Overclockable Intel Equivalents
AMD Ryzen 5 3600	AnandTech	Intel Core i5-9600KF	Intel Core i7-9700KF
$199 / $189	Price	$263	$385
Zen 2	Architecture	Coffee Lake-R (Skylake+++)	Coffee Lake-R (Skylake+++)
6C / 12T	Cores	6C / 6T	8C / 8T
3600 MHz	Base Freq	3700 MHz	3600 MHz
4200 MHz	Turbo Freq	4600 MHz	4900 MHz
65 W	TDP	95 W	95 W
2 x DDR4-3200	DDR4	2x DDR4-2666	2x DDR4-2666
PCIe 4.0 x24	PCIe	PCIe 3.0 x16	PCIe 3.0 x16

Just by going with these on-paper specifications, it’s not hard to see why the Ryzen 5 3600 has been so popular. Even at the $199 price point, the i5-9400F is a $182 processor with the same memory/PCIe downsides, as well as being lower in frequency, despite matching the power rating. The Ryzen 5 3600 is also an unlocked processor, for anyone that wants to overclock.

Intel has announced its newest 10^th Generation processor line, however the official launch date of the processors has not been officially announced yet. Out of the processor lineup however, the closest match would be the Core i5-10500.

AMD Ryzen 5 3600 vs Intel 10th Gen at ~$200
AMD Ryzen 5 3600	AnandTech	Intel Core i5-10500	Intel Core i5-10600
$199 / $189	Price	$192	$213
Zen 2	Architecture	Comet Lake (Skylake++++)	Comet Lake (Skylake++++)
6 C / 12 T	Cores	6 C / 12 T	6 C / 12 T
3600 MHz	Base Freq	3100 MHz	3300 MHz
4200 MHz	Turbo Freq	4500 MHz	4800 MHz
65 W	TDP	65 W	65 W
2x DDR4-3200	DDR4	2x DDR4-2666	2x DDR4-2666
PCIe 4.0 x24	PCIe	PCIe 3.0 x16	PCIe 3.0 x16
Yes	Overclockable	No	No
No	iGPU	Yes	Yes

This processor matches the six cores and twelve threads, is near in price, doesn’t quite match the base frequency but does exceed in the turbo. It is 65 W, the same as AMD, and on the plus side it does have integrated graphics. But again, it is only DDR4-2666 and only has 16 PCIe 3.0 lanes, compared to AMD’s DDR4-3200 and 24 PCIe 4.0 lanes.

Not only this, but our recent trips to brick-and-mortar stores (before the lockdown) looking for Intel mid-range 9^th processors have been relatively fruitless. Intel is still facing increased demand for its high-end silicon, and is still focusing on making those parts that command the highest margins, like the Xeons. We also understand that Intel might be staggering the exact release of some of this hardware, focusing on the 10^th Gen K processors first, so it might be a while before we see the mid-range CPUs at retail.

The AMD Ryzen 3 3300X and 3100 CPU Review: A Budget Gaming Bonanza

The third angle in the competition for the Ryzen 5 3600 will be with AMD’s own hardware. Having recently launched the Ryzen 3 3300X for only $120, users will have to decide if the extra $80 is worth the two extra cores in the processor. The Ryzen 5 3600 may only be popular because of it being the cheapest Zen 2 processor on the market, and if that is the case then the Ryzen 3 3300X could easily fill that role (or the Ryzen 3 3100, at $99). We tested the Ryzen 3 3300X and Ryzen 3 3100 very recently, and that review is well worth a read.

AMD vs AMD
AMD Ryzen 5 3600	AnandTech	AMD Ryzen 3 3300X
$199 / $189	Price	$120
Zen 2	Microarchitecture	Zen 2
6 C / 12 T	Cores	4 C / 8 T
3600 MHz	Base Freq	3800 MHz
4200 MHz	Turbo Freq	4300 MHz
65 W	TDP	65 W
2 x DDR4-3200	DDR4	2 x DDR4-3200
PCIe 4.0 x24	PCIe	PCIe 4.0 x24

This is one area where the Ryzen 5 3600 is in a bit of an awkward position, especially with the recent announcement relating to B550.

The Ryzen 5 3600 is a popular mid-range processor, meaning that it should be paired with a good mid-range motherboard. For the longest time, that was the B450 motherboard line, with an expectation of a possible upgrade to Ryzen 4000 later this year or next year. Unfortuantely AMD has stated that it will be locking the possible CPUs on B450 to Ryzen 3000 and below, meaning that the highest processor that a B450 owner can use is the Ryzen 9 3950X.

As is perhaps understandable, B450 owners with mid-range CPUs looking for an upgrade path are not too happy. With the announcement of B550 offering an upgrade path, there will be a lot of potential mid-range customers now waiting for the B550 motherboards to come to market.

The AMD X570 Motherboard Overview: Over 35+ Motherboards Analyzed

For those that have some money burning a hole in the pocket, X570 is always an option, with the cheapest boards available being around $150. We have performed a large round-up of all the X570 boards in the market, with specific one-off reviews for some of the more impressive models. I suspect however that potential Ryzen 5 3600 customers might be waiting for a good $120 B550 board, should one come to market.

This Review

At the request of a number of our readers, we sourced the Ryzen 5 3600 to put it through its paces in our updated test suite. Based on the responses on social media, it looks like potential Ryzen 5 3600 customers are into gaming and/or workflow on reasonably priced systems, so we’ll tackle both areas.

In our review, there are two key comparisons to look out for:

• Ryzen 5 3600 vs Ryzen 3 3300X
• Ryzen 5 3600 vs Core i5-8400 / 9400

Unfortunately we don’t have an i5-9400F for comparison, however the i5-8400 is basically the same chip by 100 MHz, with the same memory support and microarchitecture design. To make the graphs easier to understand, we've listed the results as 8400/9400. If we get a 9400 or 9400F in for testing, we will update the graphs as necessary.

Turbo, Power, and Latency

Turbo

As part of our usual test suite, we run a set of code designed to measure the time taken for the processor to ramp up in frequency. Recently both AMD and Intel are promoting features new to their processors about how quickly they can go from an active idle state into a turbo state – where previously we were talking about significant fractions of a second, we are now down to milliseconds or individual frames. Managing how quickly the processor fires up to a turbo frequency is also down to the silicon design, with sufficient frequency domains needing to be initialized up without causing any localised voltage or power issues. Part of this is also down to the OEM implantation of how the system responds to requests for high performance.

Our Ryzen 5 3600 jumped up from a 2.2 GHz high-performance idle all the way to 4.2 GHz in 16 milliseconds, which coincides exactly with a single frame on a 60 Hz display. This is right about where machines need to be in order to remain effective for a good user experience, assuming the rest of the system is up to scratch.

Power

With the Ryzen 5 3600, AMD lists the official TDP of the processor as 65 W. AMD also runs a feature called Package Power Tracking, or PPT, which allows the processor to turbo where possible to a new power value – for 65 W processors that new value is 88 W. This takes into account the power delivery capabilities of the motherboard, as well as the thermal environment. The processor can then manage exactly what frequency to give to the system in 25 MHz increments.

As part of my new test suite, we have a CPU power wrapper across several benchmarks to see the power response for a variety of different workloads.

For an AVX workload, y-Cruncher is somewhat periodic in its power use due to the way the calculation runs, but we see an almost constant 90 W peak power consumption through the whole test. The all-core turbo frequency here was in the 3875-3925 MHz range.

Our 3DPMavx test implements the highest version of AVX it can, for a series of six 10 second on, 10 second off tests, which then repeats. In this case we don’t see the processor going above 75 W in the whole process.

Photoscan is our more ‘regular’ test here, comprising of four stages each changing between single thread, multithread, and variable thread. We see peaks here up to 80 W, but the big variable threaded scenario bounces more around the 60 W mark for over 1000 seconds.

On the per-core power side, using our ray tracing power load, we see a small range of peak power values

When one thread is active, it sits at 12.8 W, but as we ramp up the cores, we get to 11.2 W per core. The non-core part of the processor, such as the IO chip, the DRAM channels and the PCIe lanes, even at idle still consume around 12-18 W in the system.

Latency

Our latency test is a simple core-to-core ping test, to detect any irregularities in the core design.

The results here are as expected.

• 7.5 nanoseconds for threads within a core
• 34 nanoseconds for cores within a CCX
• 87-91 nanoseconds between cores in different CCXes

Test Bed and Setup

As per our processor testing policy, we take a premium category motherboard suitable for the socket, and equip the system with a suitable amount of memory running at the manufacturer's maximum supported frequency. This is also typically run at JEDEC subtimings where possible. It is noted that some users are not keen on this policy, stating that sometimes the maximum supported frequency is quite low, or faster memory is available at a similar price, or that the JEDEC speeds can be prohibitive for performance. While these comments make sense, ultimately very few users apply memory profiles (either XMP or other) as they require interaction with the BIOS, and most users will fall back on JEDEC supported speeds - this includes home users as well as industry who might want to shave off a cent or two from the cost or stay within the margins set by the manufacturer. Where possible, we will extend out testing to include faster memory modules either at the same time as the review or a later date.

Test Setup
AMD Ryzen 3000	AMD Ryzen 5 3600
Motherboard	GIGABYTE X570 I Aorus Pro (1.12e)
CPU Cooler	AMD Wraith
DRAM	G.Skill FlareX 2x8 GB DDR4-3200 C14
GPU	Sapphire RX 460 2GB (CPU Tests) MSI GTX 1080 Gaming 8G (Gaming Tests)
PSU	Corsair AX860i
SSD	Crucial MX500 2TB
OS	Windows 10 1909

Many thanks to...

We must thank the following companies for kindly providing hardware for our multiple test beds. Some of this hardware is not in this test bed specifically, but is used in other testing.

Hardware Providers
Sapphire RX 460 Nitro	MSI GTX 1080 Gaming X OC	Crucial MX200 + MX500 SSDs	Corsair AX860i + AX1200i PSUs
G.Skill RipjawsV, SniperX, FlareX	Crucial Ballistix DDR4	Silverstone Coolers	Silverstone Fans

 

Scale Up vs Scale Out: Benefits of Automation

One comment we get every now and again is that automation isn’t the best way of testing – there’s a higher barrier to entry, and it limits the tests that can be done. From our perspective, despite taking a little while to program properly (and get it right), automation means we can do several things:

1. Guarantee consistent breaks between tests for cooldown to occur, rather than variable cooldown times based on ‘if I’m looking at the screen’
2. It allows us to simultaneously test several systems at once. I currently run five systems in my office (limited by the number of 4K monitors, and space) which means we can process more hardware at the same time
3. We can leave tests to run overnight, very useful for a deadline
4. With a good enough script, tests can be added very easily

Our benchmark suite collates all the results and spits out data as the tests are running to a central storage platform, which I can probe mid-run to update data as it comes through. This also acts as a mental check in case any of the data might be abnormal.

We do have one major limitation, and that rests on the side of our gaming tests. We are running multiple tests through one Steam account, some of which (like GTA) are online only. As Steam only lets one system play on an account at once, our gaming script probes Steam’s own APIs to determine if we are ‘online’ or not, and to run offline tests until the account is free to be logged in on that system. Depending on the number of games we test that absolutely require online mode, it can be a bit of a bottleneck.

Benchmark Suite Updates

As always, we do take requests. It helps us understand the workloads that everyone is running and plan accordingly.

A side note on software packages: we have had requests for tests on software such as ANSYS, or other professional grade software. The downside of testing this software is licensing and scale. Most of these companies do not particularly care about us running tests, and state it’s not part of their goals. Others, like Agisoft, are more than willing to help. If you are involved in these software packages, the best way to see us benchmark them is to reach out. We have special versions of software for some of our tests, and if we can get something that works, and relevant to the audience, then we shouldn’t have too much difficulty adding it to the suite.

CPU Performance: System Tests

Our System Test section focuses significantly on real-world testing, user experience, with a slight nod to throughput. In this section we cover application loading time, image processing, simple scientific physics, emulation, neural simulation, optimized compute, and 3D model development, with a combination of readily available and custom software. For some of these tests, the bigger suites such as PCMark do cover them (we publish those values in our office section), although multiple perspectives is always beneficial. In all our tests we will explain in-depth what is being tested, and how we are testing.

All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.

Application Load: GIMP 2.10.4

One of the most important aspects about user experience and workflow is how fast does a system respond. A good test of this is to see how long it takes for an application to load. Most applications these days, when on an SSD, load fairly instantly, however some office tools require asset pre-loading before being available. Most operating systems employ caching as well, so when certain software is loaded repeatedly (web browser, office tools), then can be initialized much quicker.

In our last suite, we tested how long it took to load a large PDF in Adobe Acrobat. Unfortunately this test was a nightmare to program for, and didn’t transfer over to Win10 RS3 easily. In the meantime we discovered an application that can automate this test, and we put it up against GIMP, a popular free open-source online photo editing tool, and the major alternative to Adobe Photoshop. We set it to load a large 50MB design template, and perform the load 10 times with 10 seconds in-between each. Due to caching, the first 3-5 results are often slower than the rest, and time to cache can be inconsistent, we take the average of the last five results to show CPU processing on cached loading.

Not much difference here between the i5-8400 and the Ryzen 5 3600.

3D Particle Movement v2.1: Brownian Motion

Our 3DPM test is a custom built benchmark designed to simulate six different particle movement algorithms of points in a 3D space. The algorithms were developed as part of my PhD., and while ultimately perform best on a GPU, provide a good idea on how instruction streams are interpreted by different microarchitectures.

A key part of the algorithms is the random number generation – we use relatively fast generation which ends up implementing dependency chains in the code. The upgrade over the naïve first version of this code solved for false sharing in the caches, a major bottleneck. We are also looking at AVX2 and AVX512 versions of this benchmark for future reviews.

For this test, we run a stock particle set over the six algorithms for 20 seconds apiece, with 10 second pauses, and report the total rate of particle movement, in millions of operations (movements) per second. We have a non-AVX version and an AVX version, with the latter implementing AVX512 and AVX2 where possible.

3DPM v2.1 can be downloaded from our server: 3DPMv2.1.rar (13.0 MB)

The core deficit comes on strong in 3DPM.

Dolphin 5.0: Console Emulation

One of the popular requested tests in our suite is to do with console emulation. Being able to pick up a game from an older system and run it as expected depends on the overhead of the emulator: it takes a significantly more powerful x86 system to be able to accurately emulate an older non-x86 console, especially if code for that console was made to abuse certain physical bugs in the hardware.

For our test, we use the popular Dolphin emulation software, and run a compute project through it to determine how close to a standard console system our processors can emulate. In this test, a Nintendo Wii would take around 1050 seconds.

The latest version of Dolphin can be downloaded from https://dolphin-emu.org/

The Ryzen 5 3600 has better single threaded performance, and so the Dolphin emulation scores better with AMD.

DigiCortex 1.20: Sea Slug Brain Simulation

This benchmark was originally designed for simulation and visualization of neuron and synapse activity, as is commonly found in the brain. The software comes with a variety of benchmark modes, and we take the small benchmark which runs a 32k neuron / 1.8B synapse simulation, equivalent to a Sea Slug.

Example of a 2.1B neuron simulation

We report the results as the ability to simulate the data as a fraction of real-time, so anything above a ‘one’ is suitable for real-time work. Out of the two modes, a ‘non-firing’ mode which is DRAM heavy and a ‘firing’ mode which has CPU work, we choose the latter. Despite this, the benchmark is still affected by DRAM speed a fair amount.

DigiCortex can be downloaded from http://www.digicortex.net/

Dual DDR4-2666 doesn't mode well for the Intel processor.

y-Cruncher v0.7.6: Microarchitecture Optimized Compute

I’ve known about y-Cruncher for a while, as a tool to help compute various mathematical constants, but it wasn’t until I began talking with its developer, Alex Yee, a researcher from NWU and now software optimization developer, that I realized that he has optimized the software like crazy to get the best performance. Naturally, any simulation that can take 20+ days can benefit from a 1% performance increase! Alex started y-cruncher as a high-school project, but it is now at a state where Alex is keeping it up to date to take advantage of the latest instruction sets before they are even made available in hardware.

For our test we run y-cruncher v0.7.6 through all the different optimized variants of the binary, single threaded and multi-threaded, including the AVX-512 optimized binaries. The test is to calculate 250m digits of Pi, and we use the single threaded and multi-threaded versions of this test.

Users can download y-cruncher from Alex’s website: http://www.numberworld.org/y-cruncher/

While almost similar in AVX2 in ST mode, the lack of threads again hurts the i5-8400, giving the win to the Ryzen 5 3600. Zen 2 does well here.

Agisoft Photoscan 1.3.3: 2D Image to 3D Model Conversion

One of the ISVs that we have worked with for a number of years is Agisoft, who develop software called PhotoScan that transforms a number of 2D images into a 3D model. This is an important tool in model development and archiving, and relies on a number of single threaded and multi-threaded algorithms to go from one side of the computation to the other.

In our test, we take v1.3.3 of the software with a good sized data set of 84 x 18 megapixel photos and push it through a reasonably fast variant of the algorithms, but is still more stringent than our 2017 test. We report the total time to complete the process.

Agisoft’s Photoscan website can be found here: http://www.agisoft.com/

CPU Performance: Rendering Tests

Rendering is often a key target for processor workloads, lending itself to a professional environment. It comes in different formats as well, from 3D rendering through rasterization, such as games, or by ray tracing, and invokes the ability of the software to manage meshes, textures, collisions, aliasing, physics (in animations), and discarding unnecessary work. Most renderers offer CPU code paths, while a few use GPUs and select environments use FPGAs or dedicated ASICs. For big studios however, CPUs are still the hardware of choice.

All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.

Corona 1.3: Performance Render

An advanced performance based renderer for software such as 3ds Max and Cinema 4D, the Corona benchmark renders a generated scene as a standard under its 1.3 software version. Normally the GUI implementation of the benchmark shows the scene being built, and allows the user to upload the result as a ‘time to complete’.

We got in contact with the developer who gave us a command line version of the benchmark that does a direct output of results. Rather than reporting time, we report the average number of rays per second across six runs, as the performance scaling of a result per unit time is typically visually easier to understand.

The Corona benchmark website can be found at https://corona-renderer.com/benchmark

Blender 2.79b: 3D Creation Suite

A high profile rendering tool, Blender is open-source allowing for massive amounts of configurability, and is used by a number of high-profile animation studios worldwide. The organization recently released a Blender benchmark package, a couple of weeks after we had narrowed our Blender test for our new suite, however their test can take over an hour. For our results, we run one of the sub-tests in that suite through the command line - a standard ‘bmw27’ scene in CPU only mode, and measure the time to complete the render.

Blender can be downloaded at https://www.blender.org/download/

LuxMark v3.1: LuxRender via Different Code Paths

As stated at the top, there are many different ways to process rendering data: CPU, GPU, Accelerator, and others. On top of that, there are many frameworks and APIs in which to program, depending on how the software will be used. LuxMark, a benchmark developed using the LuxRender engine, offers several different scenes and APIs.

In our test, we run the simple ‘Ball’ scene on both the C++ and OpenCL code paths, but in CPU mode. This scene starts with a rough render and slowly improves the quality over two minutes, giving a final result in what is essentially an average ‘kilorays per second’.

POV-Ray 3.7.1: Ray Tracing

The Persistence of Vision ray tracing engine is another well-known benchmarking tool, which was in a state of relative hibernation until AMD released its Zen processors, to which suddenly both Intel and AMD were submitting code to the main branch of the open source project. For our test, we use the built-in benchmark for all-cores, called from the command line.

POV-Ray can be downloaded from http://www.povray.org/

CPU Performance: Encoding Tests

With the rise of streaming, vlogs, and video content as a whole, encoding and transcoding tests are becoming ever more important. Not only are more home users and gamers needing to convert video files into something more manageable, for streaming or archival purposes, but the servers that manage the output also manage around data and log files with compression and decompression. Our encoding tasks are focused around these important scenarios, with input from the community for the best implementation of real-world testing.

All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.

Handbrake 1.1.0: Streaming and Archival Video Transcoding

A popular open source tool, Handbrake is the anything-to-anything video conversion software that a number of people use as a reference point. The danger is always on version numbers and optimization, for example the latest versions of the software can take advantage of AVX-512 and OpenCL to accelerate certain types of transcoding and algorithms. The version we use here is a pure CPU play, with common transcoding variations.

We have split Handbrake up into several tests, using a Logitech C920 1080p60 native webcam recording (essentially a streamer recording), and convert them into two types of streaming formats and one for archival. The output settings used are:

• 720p60 at 6000 kbps constant bit rate, fast setting, high profile
• 1080p60 at 3500 kbps constant bit rate, faster setting, main profile
• 1080p60 HEVC at 3500 kbps variable bit rate, fast setting, main profile

7-zip v1805: Popular Open-Source Encoding Engine

Out of our compression/decompression tool tests, 7-zip is the most requested and comes with a built-in benchmark. For our test suite, we’ve pulled the latest version of the software and we run the benchmark from the command line, reporting the compression, decompression, and a combined score.

It is noted in this benchmark that the latest multi-die processors have very bi-modal performance between compression and decompression, performing well in one and badly in the other. There are also discussions around how the Windows Scheduler is implementing every thread. As we get more results, it will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Please note, if you plan to share out the Compression graph, please include the Decompression one. Otherwise you’re only presenting half a picture.

WinRAR 5.60b3: Archiving Tool

My compression tool of choice is often WinRAR, having been one of the first tools a number of my generation used over two decades ago. The interface has not changed much, although the integration with Windows right click commands is always a plus. It has no in-built test, so we run a compression over a set directory containing over thirty 60-second video files and 2000 small web-based files at a normal compression rate.

WinRAR is variable threaded but also susceptible to caching, so in our test we run it 10 times and take the average of the last five, leaving the test purely for raw CPU compute performance.

AES Encryption: File Security

A number of platforms, particularly mobile devices, are now offering encryption by default with file systems in order to protect the contents. Windows based devices have these options as well, often applied by BitLocker or third-party software. In our AES encryption test, we used the discontinued TrueCrypt for its built-in benchmark, which tests several encryption algorithms directly in memory.

The data we take for this test is the combined AES encrypt/decrypt performance, measured in gigabytes per second. The software does use AES commands for processors that offer hardware selection, however not AVX-512.

CPU Performance: Synthetic, Web and Legacy Tests

While more the focus of low-end and small form factor systems, web-based benchmarks are notoriously difficult to standardize. Modern web browsers are frequently updated, with no recourse to disable those updates, and as such there is difficulty in keeping a common platform. The fast paced nature of browser development means that version numbers (and performance) can change from week to week. Despite this, web tests are often a good measure of user experience: a lot of what most office work is today revolves around web applications, particularly email and office apps, but also interfaces and development environments. Our web tests include some of the industry standard tests, as well as a few popular but older tests.

We have also included our legacy benchmarks in this section, representing a stack of older code for popular benchmarks.

All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.

GeekBench4: Synthetics

A common tool for cross-platform testing between mobile, PC, and Mac, GeekBench 4 is an ultimate exercise in synthetic testing across a range of algorithms looking for peak throughput. Tests include encryption, compression, fast Fourier transform, memory operations, n-body physics, matrix operations, histogram manipulation, and HTML parsing.

I’m including this test due to popular demand, although the results do come across as overly synthetic, and a lot of users often put a lot of weight behind the test due to the fact that it is compiled across different platforms (although with different compilers).

We record the main subtest scores (Crypto, Integer, Floating Point, Memory) in our benchmark database, but for the review we post the overall single and multi-threaded results.

Speedometer 2: JavaScript Frameworks

Our newest web test is Speedometer 2, which is a accrued test over a series of javascript frameworks to do three simple things: built a list, enable each item in the list, and remove the list. All the frameworks implement the same visual cues, but obviously apply them from different coding angles.

Our test goes through the list of frameworks, and produces a final score indicative of ‘rpm’, one of the benchmarks internal metrics. We report this final score.

Google Octane 2.0: Core Web Compute

A popular web test for several years, but now no longer being updated, is Octane, developed by Google. Version 2.0 of the test performs the best part of two-dozen compute related tasks, such as regular expressions, cryptography, ray tracing, emulation, and Navier-Stokes physics calculations.

The test gives each sub-test a score and produces a geometric mean of the set as a final result. We run the full benchmark four times, and average the final results.

Mozilla Kraken 1.1: Core Web Compute

Even older than Octane is Kraken, this time developed by Mozilla. This is an older test that does similar computational mechanics, such as audio processing or image filtering. Kraken seems to produce a highly variable result depending on the browser version, as it is a test that is keenly optimized for.

The main benchmark runs through each of the sub-tests ten times and produces an average time to completion for each loop, given in milliseconds. We run the full benchmark four times and take an average of the time taken.

3DPM v1: Naïve Code Variant of 3DPM v2.1

The first legacy test in the suite is the first version of our 3DPM benchmark. This is the ultimate naïve version of the code, as if it was written by scientist with no knowledge of how computer hardware, compilers, or optimization works (which in fact, it was at the start). This represents a large body of scientific simulation out in the wild, where getting the answer is more important than it being fast (getting a result in 4 days is acceptable if it’s correct, rather than sending someone away for a year to learn to code and getting the result in 5 minutes).

In this version, the only real optimization was in the compiler flags (-O2, -fp:fast), compiling it in release mode, and enabling OpenMP in the main compute loops. The loops were not configured for function size, and one of the key slowdowns is false sharing in the cache. It also has long dependency chains based on the random number generation, which leads to relatively poor performance on specific compute microarchitectures.

3DPM v1 can be downloaded with our 3DPM v2 code here: 3DPMv2.1.rar (13.0 MB)

x264 HD 3.0: Older Transcode Test

This transcoding test is super old, and was used by Anand back in the day of Pentium 4 and Athlon II processors. Here a standardized 720p video is transcoded with a two-pass conversion, with the benchmark showing the frames-per-second of each pass. This benchmark is single-threaded, and between some micro-architectures we seem to actually hit an instructions-per-clock wall.

CPU Performance: New Tests!

As part of our ever on-going march towards a better rounded view of the performance of these processors, we have a few new tests for you that we’ve been cooking in the lab. Some of these new benchmarks provide obvious talking points, others are just a bit of fun. Most of them are so new we’ve only run them on a few processors so far. It will be interesting to hear your feedback!

As far as this review goes, we need to perform regression testing of our new benchmarks on the older hardware, and so these resulst are here more for completeness.

NAMD ApoA1

One frequent request over the years has been for some form of molecular dynamics simulation. Molecular dynamics forms the basis of a lot of computational biology and chemistry when modeling specific molecules, enabling researchers to find low energy configurations or potential active binding sites, especially when looking at larger proteins. We’re using the NAMD software here, or Nanoscale Molecular Dynamics, often cited for its parallel efficiency. Unfortunately the version we’re using is limited to 64 threads on Windows, but we can still use it to analyze our processors. We’re simulating the ApoA1 protein for 10 minutes, and reporting back the ‘nanoseconds per day’ that our processor can simulate. Molecular dynamics is so complex that yes, you can spend a day simply calculating a nanosecond of molecular movement.

 

Crysis CPU Render

One of the most oft used memes in computer gaming is ‘Can It Run Crysis?’. The original 2007 game, built in the Crytek engine by Crytek, was heralded as a computationally complex title for the hardware at the time and several years after, suggesting that a user needed graphics hardware from the future in order to run it. Fast forward over a decade, and the game runs fairly easily on modern GPUs, but we can also apply the same concept to pure CPU rendering – can the CPU render Crysis? Since 64 core processors entered the market, one can dream. We built a benchmark to see whether the hardware can.

For this test, we’re running Crysis’ own GPU benchmark, but in CPU render mode. This is a 2000 frame test, which we run over a series of resolutions from 800x600 up to 1920x1080. Here we have the 1920x1080 results, with the rest being in our Benchmark database.

Dwarf Fortress

Another long standing request for our benchmark suite has been Dwarf Fortress, a popular management/roguelike indie video game, first launched in 2006. Emulating the ASCII interfaces of old, this title is a rather complex beast, which can generate environments subject to millennia of rule, famous faces, peasants, and key historical figures and events. The further you get into the game, depending on the size of the world, the slower it becomes.

DFMark is a benchmark built by vorsgren on the Bay12Forums that gives two different modes built on DFHack: world generation and embark. These tests can be configured, but range anywhere from 3 minutes to several hours. I’ve barely scratched the surface here, but after analyzing the test, we ended up going for three different world generation sizes.

AI Benchmark

One of the longest time requests we’ve had for our benchmark suite is AI-related benchmark, and the folks over at ETH have moved their popular AI Benchmark from mobile over PC. Using Intel’s MKL and Tensorflow 2.1.0, we use version 0.1.2 of the benchmark which tests both training and inference over a variety of different models. You can read the full scope of the benchmark here.

 

V-Ray

We have a couple of renderers and ray tracers in our suite already, however V-Ray’s benchmark came through for a requested benchmark enough for us to roll it into our suite. We run the standard standalone benchmark application, but in an automated fashion to pull out the result in the form of kilosamples/second. We run the test six times and take an average of the valid results.

Gaming: World of Tanks enCore

Albeit different to most of the other commonly played MMO or massively multiplayer online games, World of Tanks is set in the mid-20th century and allows players to take control of a range of military based armored vehicles. World of Tanks (WoT) is developed and published by Wargaming who are based in Belarus, with the game’s soundtrack being primarily composed by Belarusian composer Sergey Khmelevsky. The game offers multiple entry points including a free-to-play element as well as allowing players to pay a fee to open up more features. One of the most interesting things about this tank based MMO is that it achieved eSports status when it debuted at the World Cyber Games back in 2012.

World of Tanks enCore is a demo application for a new and unreleased graphics engine penned by the Wargaming development team. Over time the new core engine will implemented into the full game upgrading the games visuals with key elements such as improved water, flora, shadows, lighting as well as other objects such as buildings. The World of Tanks enCore demo app not only offers up insight into the impending game engine changes, but allows users to check system performance to see if the new engine run optimally on their system.

All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.

AnandTech	IGP	Low	Medium	High
Average FPS
95th Percentile

At the lower resolutions, the Ryzen takes an obvious lead, but as we go up to the ultra settings at higher resolutions, technically the Intel chip is ahead but not by much at all.

Gaming: Final Fantasy XV

Upon arriving to PC earlier this, Final Fantasy XV: Windows Edition was given a graphical overhaul as it was ported over from console, fruits of their successful partnership with NVIDIA, with hardly any hint of the troubles during Final Fantasy XV's original production and development.

In preparation for the launch, Square Enix opted to release a standalone benchmark that they have since updated. Using the Final Fantasy XV standalone benchmark gives us a lengthy standardized sequence to record, although it should be noted that its heavy use of NVIDIA technology means that the Maximum setting has problems - it renders items off screen. To get around this, we use the standard preset which does not have these issues.

Square Enix has patched the benchmark with custom graphics settings and bugfixes to be much more accurate in profiling in-game performance and graphical options. For our testing, we run the standard benchmark with a FRAPs overlay, taking a 6 minute recording of the test.

All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.

AnandTech	IGP	Low	Medium	High
Average FPS
95th Percentile

Gaming: Civilization 6 (DX12)

Originally penned by Sid Meier and his team, the Civ series of turn-based strategy games are a cult classic, and many an excuse for an all-nighter trying to get Gandhi to declare war on you due to an integer overflow. Truth be told I never actually played the first version, but every edition from the second to the sixth, including the fourth as voiced by the late Leonard Nimoy, it a game that is easy to pick up, but hard to master.

Benchmarking Civilization has always been somewhat of an oxymoron – for a turn based strategy game, the frame rate is not necessarily the important thing here and even in the right mood, something as low as 5 frames per second can be enough. With Civilization 6 however, Firaxis went hardcore on visual fidelity, trying to pull you into the game. As a result, Civilization can taxing on graphics and CPUs as we crank up the details, especially in DirectX 12.

Perhaps a more poignant benchmark would be during the late game, when in the older versions of Civilization it could take 20 minutes to cycle around the AI players before the human regained control. The new version of Civilization has an integrated ‘AI Benchmark’, although it is not currently part of our benchmark portfolio yet, due to technical reasons which we are trying to solve. Instead, we run the graphics test, which provides an example of a mid-game setup at our settings.

All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.

AnandTech	1080p Ultra
Average FPS
95th Percentile

Gaming: Ashes Classic (DX12)

Seen as the holy child of DirectX12, Ashes of the Singularity (AoTS, or just Ashes) has been the first title to actively go explore as many of the DirectX12 features as it possibly can. Stardock, the developer behind the Nitrous engine which powers the game, has ensured that the real-time strategy title takes advantage of multiple cores and multiple graphics cards, in as many configurations as possible.

As a real-time strategy title, Ashes is all about responsiveness during both wide open shots but also concentrated battles. With DirectX12 at the helm, the ability to implement more draw calls per second allows the engine to work with substantial unit depth and effects that other RTS titles had to rely on combined draw calls to achieve, making some combined unit structures ultimately very rigid.

Stardock clearly understand the importance of an in-game benchmark, ensuring that such a tool was available and capable from day one, especially with all the additional DX12 features used and being able to characterize how they affected the title for the developer was important. The in-game benchmark performs a four minute fixed seed battle environment with a variety of shots, and outputs a vast amount of data to analyze.

For our benchmark, we run Ashes Classic: an older version of the game before the Escalation update. The reason for this is that this is easier to automate, without a splash screen, but still has a strong visual fidelity to test.

Ashes has dropdown options for MSAA, Light Quality, Object Quality, Shading Samples, Shadow Quality, Textures, and separate options for the terrain. There are several presents, from Very Low to Extreme: we run our benchmarks at the above settings, and take the frame-time output for our average and percentile numbers.

All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.

AnandTech	IGP	Low	Medium	High
Average FPS
95th Percentile

Gaming: Strange Brigade (DX12, Vulkan)

Strange Brigade is based in 1903’s Egypt and follows a story which is very similar to that of the Mummy film franchise. This particular third-person shooter is developed by Rebellion Developments which is more widely known for games such as the Sniper Elite and Alien vs Predator series. The game follows the hunt for Seteki the Witch Queen who has arose once again and the only ‘troop’ who can ultimately stop her. Gameplay is cooperative centric with a wide variety of different levels and many puzzles which need solving by the British colonial Secret Service agents sent to put an end to her reign of barbaric and brutality.

The game supports both the DirectX 12 and Vulkan APIs and houses its own built-in benchmark which offers various options up for customization including textures, anti-aliasing, reflections, draw distance and even allows users to enable or disable motion blur, ambient occlusion and tessellation among others. AMD has boasted previously that Strange Brigade is part of its Vulkan API implementation offering scalability for AMD multi-graphics card configurations.

AnandTech	IGP	Low	Medium	High
Average FPS
95th Percentile

All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.

AnandTech	IGP	Low	Medium	High
Average FPS
95th Percentile

By our low settings, there is barely any differentiation between CPUs.

Gaming: Far Cry 5

The latest title in Ubisoft's Far Cry series lands us right into the unwelcoming arms of an armed militant cult in Montana, one of the many middles-of-nowhere in the United States. With a charismatic and enigmatic adversary, gorgeous landscapes of the northwestern American flavor, and lots of violence, it is classic Far Cry fare. Graphically intensive in an open-world environment, the game mixes in action and exploration.

Far Cry 5 does support Vega-centric features with Rapid Packed Math and Shader Intrinsics. Far Cry 5 also supports HDR (HDR10, scRGB, and FreeSync 2). We use the in-game benchmark for our data, and report the average/minimum frame rates.

All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.

AnandTech	IGP	Low	High
Average FPS
95th Percentile

Gaming: F1 2018

Aside from keeping up-to-date on the Formula One world, F1 2017 added HDR support, which F1 2018 has maintained; otherwise, we should see any newer versions of Codemasters' EGO engine find its way into F1. Graphically demanding in its own right, F1 2018 keeps a useful racing-type graphics workload in our benchmarks.

We use the in-game benchmark, set to run on the Montreal track in the wet, driving as Lewis Hamilton from last place on the grid. Data is taken over a one-lap race.

All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.

AnandTech	IGP	Low	Medium	High
Average FPS
95th Percentile

AMD Ryzen 5 3600 Conclusion

One of the major factors going into this review was the fact that the AMD Ryzen 5 3600 sits on top of the Amazon Best Sellers list in the US. Just to give you a sense of scale, here are the top 10 lists for each of the major Amazon regions:

Amazon CPU Best Sellers
AnandTech	US .com	UK .co.uk	EU .de	AU .com.au
#1	Ryzen 5 3600	Ryzen 5 3600	Ryzen 5 3600	Ryzen 7 3700X
#2	Ryzen 7 3700X	Ryzen 5 2600	Ryzen 7 3700X	Ryzen 9 3900X
#3	Ryzen 5 3600X	Ryzen 7 3700X	Ryzen 5 2600	Ryzen 5 3600
#4	Ryzen 9 3900X	Ryzen 5 3600X	Ryzen 9 3900X	Ryzen 3 3200G
#5	Ryzen 3 3200G	Ryzen 9 3900X	Core i7-9700K	USB-C Hub
#6	Ryzen 5 2600	Ryzen 7 3800X	Core i5-9600K	Pentium G4560
#7	Core i7-9700K	Core i7-9700K	Ryzen 7 3800X	Pentium G5400
#8	Core i5-9600K	Ryzen 3 3200G	CPU Cooler	Ryzen 5 2600
#9	Ryzen 7 3800X	Ryzen 7 2700X	Ryzen 5 3600X	Ryzen 7 2700X
#10	Core i9-9900K	Core i5-9600K	Core i3-9100F	Ryzen 3 1200

As we can see, the AMD Ryzen 5 3600 comes #1 in the US, the UK, in Germany/EU, and third in Australia. In Australia the 3700X takes the top spot, and a USB-C hub takes the fifth spot. The highest spot on these charts for Intel is 5^th in the European chart, and on three of the charts the top selling Intel processor is the i7-9700K.

It is worth noting here that these best seller charts don’t always tell the whole story. Sometimes some third party sellers post their hardware as completely new listings, which screws up the system, and it doesn’t take into account any pre-built machines or sales outside of Amazon. Where AMD’s Ryzen 5 3600 is the choice for system builders at home, businesses requiring pre-built systems is obviously a separate story.

We had earmarked the Core i5-9400F as the main competitor to the Ryzen 5 3600 due to the price banding, but none of the i5-9400F-like processors are even shown in the top 10, indicating just how popular the Ryzen 5 3600 is. Of course, with the Core i5-10500 on its way to be the main competition here, it will be interesting to see if it lands on this chart at all – not only for it to be competitive but for Intel to put enough stock into the market.

Having another flick through our benchmarks, it is clear why the Ryzen 5 3600 is a popular choice. It’s a great all-round chip that hits high marks in practically every benchmark, and can keep up with games at either low resolutions or high resolutions. Against some of the quad-core AMD parts it might be lacking a bit in single threaded performance, but that is part of the trade-off: having 6 cores and 12 threads helps everywhere where there is a threaded workload, such as transcoding or complex workflow. Compared to the similarly priced Intel chips, it’s not much of a contest.

The only critical element right now surrounding the Ryzen 5 3600 is the motherboard situation, and how users want to perceive their upgrade strategy. If the goal is to move up to a Ryzen 4000 CPU sometime next year, then users will either have to buy an expensive X570 motherboard or wait until the B550 motherboards come to market at some point in the future (date for on-shelf retail still not announced).

If users want a system today, then the B450 and X470 options are still available, and there is an upgrade path to the Ryzen 9 3950X. Moving from 6 cores to 16 cores isn’t anything to be sniffed at. Either that, or sell the motherboard and CPU as a combination when it is time to upgrade to Ryzen 4000.

There is no official word on Ryzen 4000 / Zen 3 launch yet. AMD has only said ‘Zen 3 by the end of the year’, which could be interpreted in a lot of ways. This means any Ryzen 5 3600 system built today is going to last for a long while to come.