Is the AMD Ryzen 5 3600X good for gaming?
Gaming on the mid-range Ryzen CPU
The CPU is an important part of any gaming rig since the processor is what sends the frames to the GPU for further processing. If you have a sluggish CPU that cannot keep up with the GPU, you'll be wasting away valuable resources on the GPU as it waits for the CPU to throw it more frames to render. Thus, it's important you choose a CPU that can keep up with most GPUs available today, and the Ryzen 5 3600X is one of those CPUs.
What makes this CPU so good for gaming? It's a six-core processor with hyperthreading — resulting in a total of 12 threads — with a base clock speed of 3.8GHz and a boost of around 4.4GHz. That's without overclocking, which you can easily do with AMD's software suite or your motherboard BIOS. All this performance allows you to use anything up to an RTX 2080 Ti and the CPU may only struggle in extreme cases, like when you're trying to play at high settings on a monitor with a high refresh rate.
As good as Intel at gaming
It was the case with AMD's older FX processors and even the first two generations of Ryzen that Intel simply outperformed Ryzen processors when it came to single-core testing and gaming. This is no longer the case when comparing the newest 3000 Ryzen processors against Intel counterparts. It's neck and neck, which is a commendable achievement for AMD considering just how behind the company was just a few years ago.
The latest Ryzen 5 3600X comes rocking some considerable improvements over the Ryzen 5 2600X, including:
- Double floating point with a redesigned engine.
- Double the amount of cache.
- 15 percent IPC (instructions per-clock) uplift.
What this means for the new family of Ryzen processors is a substantial increase in efficiency and performance. Couple the Ryzen 5 3600X with a GPU like the RTX 2060 and you have an amazing combo that can handle most games at high settings on a 1440p monitor with a solid frames-per-second (FPS) rate.
Mid-range price with shocking levels of performance
The Ryzen 5 3600X shouldn't perform as well as it does when looking at just how aggressively AMD has priced the processor. You've got six cores and 12 threads, making it an amazing CPU for gaming and productivity, all at a reasonable price.
The RTX 2060 offers excellent mid-tier gaming performance
The RTX 2060 is a great GPU. Not only are the aftermarket cards of higher quality with better cooling solutions, but you're also getting faster memory, more CUDA cores, and better overall performance. Add on top of all this support for ray tracing and NVIDIA's DLSS and you've got quite the GPU.
