Was The Ryzen 5 5600 A Mistake To Recommend Gamers? 6 vs. 16-cores in 2024 

My parents are running a 5600G, a gift for their birthday. They have never seen a faster computer in their life 😂

Steve learned his lesson about 5800x3d

I got a 5800X for free. People paid me to build them an editing machine and specified a 5800X. They then said it was too slow and asked me to drop a 5950X in the machine. When I asked what they wanted done with the 5800X they said to just keep it. No problem. I swapped out my 3700X. Pure bliss.

I just love how the 5600 was a mid range CPU to 'almost budget' price and you get 90-130 fps even in highly demanding tripple A games on ultra. Its so nice when you get actually good value for your money, and dont have to count pennies and make multi year plans. Now if GPU pricing could stop being cancer...

Still rocking a r5 5600 with rx 6600 xt which i built myself on September of 2022. Has been a charm, no issues whatsoever. My friends suggested me to buy rtx 3050/60 instead of an AMD card saying that amd cards have driver issues. I researched and bought 6600 xt and had no issues. Its good that i didn't listen to them Lmao

Ryzen 5 5600 still a midrange beast

Thank you for including the 5800X3D Steve, but still, where is the Phenom 2 x6 1055T?

Always happy seeing the 5800X3D be included so I do appreciate it. I need my bias confirmed regularly 🙃

One of the best Amd CPUs ever imo

5950X and RTX 3080 for productivity and some light gaming. Absolutely flies even after 3 years, great CPU.

It's more than enough to drive my RX 6600, very happy with my whole setup so far :)

Ryzen 5 5600 is still a beast. Probably the best choice for a budget gaming machine. Toss in something like RX 6800 second hand with it and you have one hell of a machine to enjoy literally anything on the market at 1440p.

I bought the 5600 in april 2023 for 120€ and that was the best purchase ever. It is enough for the games i play in combo with rx 7800xt.

That 5800x3d is really AMD 2500k moment.

clarification needed, AUDIO says CL14 for the RAM but the text on screen says CL 16.

I ran a 5600X until I upgraded to a 5800X3D, it worked pretty well for me. Thumbs up!

5600 is a great cpu

We get it. X3d or bust lol.

Awesome video!!! Thank you for this bench :D, appreciate so many bench's :)

My Ryzen 5600 literally just came 15 minutes ago. Time to finally enter a world of higher IPC than Haswell/Broadwell lol

You don't know how I wanted this video. I really do. I am putting together a pc mini itx 5L, with which I want to last about 4 or 5 years. But I don't want to spend more than I need. I have found the 5600 for 95$ and the 5700x for 150$. I have watched thousands of videos including yours. But I've always been left with that pimple as the videos are a few years old and I would like more recent information. And here you come to the rescue. It's as if you have listened to my wishes. Thank you.

I bought an 5950X a couple of years ago and love it to this day. I don't think I'll need to upgrade for another few years yet.

*'60 Percent Of Playtime In 2023 Went To 6-Year-Old Or Older Games'* League of Legends, Roblox, Minecraft, CG:GO, Sims 4, Rocket League, Rainbow 6 Siege, Fortnite, Apex. 5600/5600X is more than excellent for the vast majority of games people actually play.

Lol, no not a mistake. That part's sold for as low as $120 from what I've seen.

The 5600 costs like 80 dollars at aliexpress. So it's a no brainer for budget gamers.

Built my son a gaming PC for Christmas. 5600, B550 mATX board, an Asrock 6600, and reused a spare kit of DDR4 I had. CPU was 190, Mobo was 130 and GPU was 220. All in CAD. All he plays is Fall Guys, Roblox and Minecraft, so its more than enough for now, and should be enough for him to grow in to. Probably isn't a better budget combo for what you get out there right now.

Finally 6-core content not focused on the 3600; 5600 with unified cache is the gaming baseline really, 3600 was just ok. Sold my 3600 for $200 and got the 5600 for $280 at launch from microcenter... Been great so far. Appreciate the 4k benchmarks as thats what res i play at, as there's virtually no difference between them at the res, im sticking with the 5600x till next gen at least. Unfortunately the x3d upgrade costs too much to be worth it really.

Great tests, thank you! In order to confirm the theory about core count, would be also interesting to see the same tests with the same CPU but different core count choosen in the Windows, like going from 16 down to 4 or even 2 cores. Thanks for the video!

No Mistake at all, been running this beauty for 2 years and she's running strong!

Nice Steve. Can you also do this with the 7000 series? Thanks for always bring good content.

Cheers for another excellent vid Steve and crew! Timely too...Scorptec have just dropped off my new 5700X3D to drop in upgrade my 5600. Running 6700XT and playing Farm and Truck Sims and Racing Games (these would be considered CPU intensive/ V-Cache hungry titles yeah?) on twin 1440p 144Hz ultrawides. Will be interesting to run before and after tests to see the improvement 😁 Also got faster RAM to drop in... Keep up the good work guys! 🇦🇺

Great video as usual! It would have been interesting with the 5800X3D in.. oh, wait, it was there :D

Seems to be a solid upgrade choice still for AM4 picking the 5800X3D & a 4000 series rtx card above the 4070.

got 5 5600x no problems my games run more smoother than with 5 2600 on the same graphic card 1060 6gb

Hi Steve, thanks for looking into this. I've been recommending a good solid 6 core processor to budget minded ,gaming focused customers for years. Thankfully I'm not too far off the mark. One for other people to look into is the whole gaming experience is more than just fps. I've found that loading times, game update, and asset streaming for computers with beefier processors tend to load much more quickly. Overall the gaming experience when quick travelling or loading in new areas feel much more immersive. If I were to aim for a budget focused computer, the lion's share of the budget should be for the gpu. For more balanced builds, I would definitely pick a solid 8core cpu. The next question that I would like a revisit the intel big and little core designs. Did they improve the scheduler at all? Some games just run weird with little cores active.

Thanks for doing this throwback comparison. I'm glad to see that even four years after release, for some of these chips, they are still performing well in some of the latest titles.

So happy to have upgraded to the 5800x3d from a 3600.

I did a side-grade from a 9900k to a 5600X and dropped the heat in my room massively and gained PCIe 4.0 with gen 4 SSDs. I still have both of those systems as well as a 7700X and 7800X3D+4090 system. The 5600X was a bargain in a $230 Microcenter combo with a MSI motherboard.

Just ordered a 5600x 2 days ago (before watching this video) to replace my aging Ryzen 3 3100, for around 120$ (new). It's an incredibly cheap upgrade. Was thinking about waiting for the 5500x3d but they keep delaying it and i doubt' it'll be much less than double the 5600x's price.

As always, that was an extensive rock solid gear performance comparison and value analysis. Thank you Steeve!

Can we get a old HEDT platforms re-visit video with LGA 2066 Xtreme series and OG Threadripper

NGL had to double check those release dates! Sheesh how time flies!!

Love these videos! Keep it up guys!

Please do include the frame per dollar charts more often. Its useful almost in every video but especially in those kind of videos where you specifically compare how good each part was/is between generations.

Been happy with my 5600x and 4080 in 1440p and 4k.

I think the channel Hardware Unboxed is referring to that wanted 8+ cores has pretty much been killed off. They only play reruns of their member-only content last I checked

I got the black sheep of the generation, the 5900X. Great CPU and a nice improvement over the 3700X it replaced.

Im curious to see how did you take these Benchmarks in details, can these be seen on Patreon or Floatplane?

The 5700x3d and 5800x3d are beast of CPUs for the price if you already are on an am4 platform if not then 5600 is enough

AM4 thr platforn that keeps on giving !!!

When I helped my friend build his 5800X build in 2020, he scored a working great open box deal, saved $100 on that chip. Still happy with that rig for 1080P, GPU was upgraded to a midrange one later. He's more of a multitasker first and a gamer second poweruser. Had it released sooner, I would have ended up on a similar rig. Have a few 12th gen around, good sales on them last year. Nobara is great enough where I can abandon 11 and just keep around a 10 install if something breaks. At the time 12700KF & 12900KF were good deals (still see some cheap combos or options there), though I think 7500F is the value AM5 play now, certainly more platform longevity. I notice the IPC and the OS a lot between machines, though I'm not sure with P cores E cores. I'm sure I could put my 6 core into a CPU bound game scenario where it might dip more in FPS but still be entirely playable. Not sure when I need to upgrade again 12900KF 4090, but I'd likely hop on AM5 later. I kinda want to throw my 7900XTX into a Nobara rig see how well that does as an experiment. I would stay on Windows 10 with that 5600 until EOL. 130 was a good value for 5600 though for a new build, though it's still a used price performance deal now. My mother likes a lot of 6 core chips, so they can have a second life after gaming, she doesn't mind the old 9600K or 12400F, just browses the web and doesn't want the latest and greatest.

Thank you for this video! I was considering upgrading my 5600X to an 5800X but now I do not anymore😅 But I'd love to see some CPU depending titles like CS2, Fortnite, Overwatch 2, etc (I think you -r- get what I mean). But I also understand that you just can not test each and every title existing so I am very happy you brought us this very informative video!😃

AM4 is the GOAT platform.

built my first pc with ryzen 5600 paired with rx 6800 for 1440p, definitely not disappointed

The FPS margins will continue to shrink in more GPU bound scenarios and higher resolutions, if you have an extra $300 for a 5950x you are better off putting that money towards a higher tier GPU. $300 is enough to move from like a 6600 to a 6800 which is like a 70-80% improvement in fps.

Got a 5600 and plan, when the time is needed, to go 5700X3D most likely since the price is much lower (second hand AliExpress) than the 5800X3D but performance not that much lower. AM5 looks fun and all but I don't feel the need to leave AM4 till AM6 probably.

The idea that memory cache is important was already back in the socket 370 pentium 3 era. They were similar clocked Celerons with a lot less memory cache, while most other things were practically equal. Those Celerons were a lot slower. Basically scaling in a similar fashion actually. This is also one of the reasons these older Intel Xeon's still cope pretty decently. They also have a lot of cache.

I honestly don't remember the x3d variant of the 5800 having such a big margin over its non x3d variant... Maybe its because of the choice of games that were specifically chosen as more cpu-demanding?

Got a 5600 actually this year, to pair with 6700xt for 1440p gaming. Couldn't be happier. It's definitely fast enough for everything I play.

Paired two 5600 with 6650XT and the other with 6700xt. It's more than enough for another at least 2 generations of middle class GPUs.

4:38 were these CPUs tested with DDR4 3600mhz cl 16 (as shown in the graph) or cl 14 (as you said)?

3D Cache Gang lets gooooo

Used the 5600X for years, and it was great. Got a used 5900X for $243 about a month ago, and it's doing a great job and is a good bit faster than my 5600X.

My 5600x has served me well over the last 3 years and I have no regrets! Paired with my 7800XT, it's been a great little combo and I don't feel a need to upgrade yet.

Still rocking a 3600

The 5600 and 5600X are actually a LOT faster than the Ryzen 3600 in a lot of games. In some benchmarks done by Gamer's Nexus maybe half a year ago, I was surprised to see how far ahead the 5600 was over a 3600 in some games in FPS as well as in 1% lows. The margin was as big as about 35% in a few games. You can see a pretty big gap in the averages shown at the end of this video as well. Even the 3700X and 3950X are getting soundly beaten by the 5600X, but the margin in some games is obviously much higher than the average difference. I think the only reason it was able to win by such a wide margin in some games is because the 3600 has a split L3 cache (16MB per core cluster), whereas single chiplet Zen 3 CPUs have a unified 32MB L3 cache shared by all 6-8 cores. I think the Zen 3 CPUs actually use the same I/O chiplets as Zen 2 CPUs, so if the cache hadn't been re-designed for Zen 3, the performance improvement (in games) between these two generations would have been much smaller. I was honestly surprised how much the 5800X's extra two cores were able to help in some games, but having a more modern CPU is typically a lot more important than having more cores. It's not just the per-core performance improvement from one generation to the next which matters a lot, it's also the the other CPU components which aren't contained within each core which also make a huge difference in CPU performance, and these things tend to improve with each CPU generation, namely I/O speed and L3 cache size and L3 cache design. With AMD multi chiplet CPUs, the I/O chiplet can be used for multiple generations, and this could contribute to Zen 5 not offering a very big performance improvement in gaming over Zen 4. If Zen 6 uses an updated I/O chiplet, that could make Zen 6 a significantly bigger improvement than Zen 5 for gaming performance, especially if the CPU chiplets are also made using the more advanced TSMC 3nm process.

I always thought that the 5600 was released at the wrong time. It came too late to be properly relevant. They released the 5600X earlier, and it was fine. A great price point for a fast 6-core. But both suffer a bit from the Core 2 Quad Q6600 situation, just a bit different. The Q6600 wasn't really good. Don't get me wrong, it was a fast processor, but when it released, gamers didn't benefit from a quad, faster dual cores like the E6850 or E8400 were released shortly after, cost less, and gave better gaming results. And by the time games did see an improvement from 4 cores, the Q6600 was usually to slow, faster quads (Like the Q9400 or Q9550, but also i5-750, i7-860 or i7-920) were available and more efficient. Sure, the Q6600 could be overclocked, but the same applied to other CPUs as well. And there wasn't a case where an overclocked Q6600 could keep up, but an overclocked E8400 did not. Now the 5600 and 5700X made the 5600X and 5800X obsolete basically overnight. Performance difference was minimal, and if one wanted the 2-4% more clock, that was easy to do manually. The 5900X was also in a weird spot. It has a 2x6 core config, which meant in games that benefit from 8 cores, it was often slower than the 5800X with 1x8 cores, simply through the die-to-die latency. Those last two used cores simply didn't perform on par with the other six. The 5950X with 2x8 cores didn't have that issue. The 5800X3D performs really well when things make use of the cache. I've seen games where it outperforms the 12900K by 40% and more. And as the results show, the 5600/5600X are still capable enough. Yes, they are slower than their bigger siblings as expected, but still perform "good enough", Especially at 4K, where the games run into GPU limits more often. In 1080p it's more of a situation of not fully using the GPU potential, but that just means there is headroom for a later upgrade, or to simply increase visual fidelity at no loss of performance. And considering somewhat older games are extremely popular (read somewhere that the most popular games average around 6 years), that gives the 6-core chips even more lifespan. So I'd say recommending the 5600 wasn't a mistake. I would go even further and say it's still okay to recommend. Yes, AM4 is an aging platform, but the 5600 still performs well enough, and being on the lower end of the lineup, there is a massive upgrade down the line to a used 5800X3D or 5950X in a couple years.

More cores doesn't mean more performance necessarily, true. But 10 years ago people were saying that 4 core/8 threads was all we would ever need. More cores' performance will scale with time that's for sure, but will that scale quickly enough to take advantage of Zen 3 or Zen 4 while they're still relevant? Probably not, hard to say. I guess the point is to buy a processor that fits your needs and bugdet in the current window in time, like always. TLDR: I like commas.

Ratchet and Clank is a glimpse to a future where more cores will help games: Data streaming over the CPU, using background cores, thus offloading the GPU as it doesnt have to do the heavy lifting when there is available cores on the CPU to do it. We will see more games like that, however Unreal engine games likely wont make use of it for a decade, since Epic still are too incompetent to make data streaming not cause stutters along with their shader compilation mess

I leave my 5600X on 65 watt defaults and it runs most stuff fine. I uncork the power limits when it needs a bump then it maxes around 110 watts. Rarely need to do that with a 3080 10GB. I don't feel the need to go 5800X3D at this point, I'll wait for a full platform update in a year or two (or three).

I have a 5700x which has similar performance to the 5600x and 5800x, it's a pretty solid CPU that fulfills my needs.

AND ................ that's why I waited for the 5800X3D to drop down to $350 to buy it. And then built the other gaming system in the house with the 5800X3D when it dropped down on special for $300. Those 1% lows just amazing. Certainly the best systems I've built for 2K gaming with a high quality GPU. Smooth as can be. Next upgrade = Zen 6 when AMD moves to direct connects which will make their MCM architecture much faster AND lower power. And this video gets to the point of how people build and buy systems. Yes I could buy and sell systems on a regular basis and always be on the latest thing. I don't like doing that though because I like getting together I system I enjoy and then having it for a few years with possibly a GPU upgrade and that's it. So, back then I preferred buying an 8 core CPU which at the time was a 3700X/X570 setup and then since I heard about vcache and how it would boost gaming at about the same time AMD released Zen 3 (one of the reps talked about vcache that they were developing and would be out about a year after Zen 3 released), I waited for the 5800X3D to drop in price. But I do other things with my system from time to time that benefits from the extra cores so it wasn't a big deal to pay the extra cost of 8c/16t. It's what I WANTED. It also helps when multitasking keep everything running well. So, it's about how you like to build systems, and it's about use cases, and reviewers don't test multitasking because there's no good way to do so. Or, there is, they just don't. But if part of your multitasking is browsing the web or watching YT while doing other things on the system, that gets harder to test.

".. despite my best efforts to explain it.. it can be misleading.." you keep trying to reach these ppl. They need you Steve ❤️❤️❤️ Still celebrating 1mill 🎉🎉🎉🎉

The guy who runs the channel "Tech Deals" could really learn a lot from these videos

Quite the timing. Recently upgraded my 2600 with 5600 and very happy with it, especially in modded Minecraft, where difference is almost x2 fps

I love these refreshed reviews, I'd really like to see how a OC'd 8700k compares to these cpus and even some lower end newer cpus

Was resizable bar turned on?

If someone has the money for RTX 4090 then i dont expect that person to buy just "a 6 core CPU" to pair it with that graphics card. Fitting the budget expectation to reality will "shrink" the difference.

I had a nice chuckle when you showed the 4K data. Y'all have been talking about why it doesn't matter for a solid year and enough viewers are still confused

You added Helldivers 2 to your benchmark suite ❤

You must choose another kind of games: Simulation games in VR like: AMS2 RF2 ACC, CPU is super important in VR. Also, we need at minimum 90FPS, at a resolution superior to 4k.

No 1440p benchmarks? Thats literally all I clicked this video for. Smh

Great info. I’m still using a 5950X and will be for a few more years.

I've commented this before, but I'd be curious to see how ray tracing in these games scales with the cores, it it's single core intensive or can it scale to multiple cores. The games here that scaled better than 3 to 4% on 5600 were the ones that needed more processing power to generate the frames. Hence, RT might also scale similarly, maybe not, will be curious to see that.

This happens because tech reviews focus 100% on current games, but rarely speak about future profing, my advice id always spend more on the CPU than you think you need

First!

i just bought a 5700x for 175, it gets here this week. its a upgrade from a 5500 that i got for 70 dollars and will just be flipping the 5500 to make back most of what i bought it for

Great info. I'd like to see the same test of the 12400 through the 12900k.

L3 is quite important, even in a productivity, no-gaming setting. Thank you for highlighting all of these examples. Great video 👍

I snagged a 5700X from Amazon with a Resident Evil 4 code back in Nov of 2022 for $160 shipped. Great upgrade from the 1700X and tears through 4K with my 6950XT. That 3D Cache for the 1% lows do look enticing though not gonna lie lol

I've been legit upset that our regional prices at that time were just HORRIBLE and had to settle for 3600 in hopes for upgrading at some point. Luckily snagged 5700X3D for about the same price (or even cheaper if adjusted for inflation and stuff) 5600 used to cost back then.

Great content! Thanks for this.

Could have been nice to retest with the same hardware as was done in the original review, to get a how well did it age with new bios, windows updates, and drivers

as a 5800x3d owner (had 5950x too)... the 5600 is the MVP. It rivals a 12400/13500 ddr4 setup (source pc built for brother and steves TS testing) without needing to buy a new board. Has 32MB of cache and

excellent content as always. Hardware Unboxed never disappoints. Thank you

Would love if you start including RT benchmarks on these chips. In Cyberpunk my 5800X3D is strained a lot more even with just RT reflections enabled. Having these comparisons can be helpful for anyone interested in RT in RT heavy titles. Wondering if theres any reason this isnt done already. Thanks Steve!

Rocking 5600x and 7800xt. Just built this am4 mobo cpu and ram for 320. Was on budget and was able to spend more on gpu. Hehe. Am totally fine with AM4 vs AM5. Will last me years as I come from i7 4790k.

Omg i was waiting for this review ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️😀 thank you

I love these 'We told you so' videos from HUB.

Just a suggestion and i know it would be probably alot of work but would you guys ever create a spreadsheet with these graphs for each game you test for each cpu and gpu that you use and log 1080, 2k and 4k results? It might be handy for users to look at a game for a particular cpu that they have and want to compare it to a certain GPU that they want to buy etc