The Ryzen 5 5600X is the most affordable member of the Zen 3 family and follows reviews of the Ryzen 9 5900X and Ryzen 7 5800X. So far, one serious criticism of AMD's Zen 3 is that the chips are a bit pricey. This is less of an issue at the high end, where "time is money" and high performance allows you to make up time, but as you start to stack down and focus on gaming, you need to get that payback more immediately.

Basically, a good gaming CPU should not be as expensive as an entire system.

That's where the 5600X comes in: you can't call $299 a budget CPU, but it's a manageable price point in the mainstream and has historically had plenty of competition. Currently, the Core i7 10700K sells for about $375, but a more direct comparison is the Core i5 10600K, which costs $275.

Like other Zen 3 chips, this update to the 3600X saw a $50 price increase, but unlike other chips, this chip still comes with a cooler. This makes this chip a better value than the Intel product (which does not ship with a cooler), all else being equal.

For testing purposes, we benchmarked using the included Wraith Stealth cooler and also using the same Zadak Spark AIO liquid cooler as the other Zen 3 chips we tested. So you can see what difference you can expect if you decide to upgrade to an aftermarket chiller. [The Ryzen 5 5600X is a 6-core, 12-thread processor with a base clock of 3.7 GHz and a maximum boost of 4.6 GHz. It is built with a single core, 32MB of L3 cache, and the same I/O die as the Zen 2. To learn more about what Zen 3 is all about, please see the Zen 3 architecture section of our Ryzen 9 5900X review.

As with other chips in the Zen 3 family, boost clocks often exceed the official upper limit of 4.6 GHz; even with the Wraith Stealth cooler, the cores run at 4,650 MHz, and 4.7 GHz is not unheard of with a liquid cooler. If you are using a full-threaded application where all cores are maxed out, 4,175 MHz is the best you can get, which is also quite healthy.

The 5600X's TDP is 65W, limiting power consumption to 76W from the socket. This is surprisingly low for a modern CPU and means that if overclocking is your thing, there is plenty of potential for shenanigans. Incidentally, the chip is unlocked, but you'll need a decent cooler to really take advantage of this fact.

Finally, while AMD officially supports DDR4 RAM up to 3,200 MHz, faster memory will work just fine; Infinity Fabric runs at 1,800 MHz by default, so a 3,600 MHz DDR4 combination makes sense. In the future, a BIOS update may enable a faster Infinity Clock (FCLK), but AMD does not guarantee this at launch.

Having seen the 12-core 5900X and 8-core 5800X, it is a bit of a rude awakening to have only 6 cores available again, with more powerful numbers in X264 video encoding and Cinebench R20 3D rendering benchmarks. In fact, the 5600X is close to Intel's 10700K, which is impressive considering it's an 8-core CPU; the Zen architecture is a real step forward.

If you want to do gaming and more serious work in parallel, you should opt for a higher-end CPU; the 5900X is considerably more expensive, but offers almost twice the performance of this chip in terms of rendering and encoding. This is because it is essentially two 5600Xs in one package. However, the gaming performance is the same regardless. What really impresses AMD is the gaming performance, with numbers that rival Intel's 10900K at the top of the processor stack. Yes, a chip that costs twice the price AMD is asking. To be fair, not in every game, but overall, there is nothing between this $299 CPU and Intel's $599 10-core, 20-thread monster CPU.

Again, the most impressive performance improvement over the previous generation is F1 2019, with not only a significant increase in average performance, but also in minimum frame rates. Overall, the experience is smoother; Total War: Three Kingdoms is another standout performer, with average values equaling 10700K and producing smoother frame rates than 10900K.

Even at 4K, the extra performance of the 10900K does not offer much of an advantage, as seen in the Assassin's Creed Odyssey benchmark at 1440p and the Far Cry New Dawn benchmark at 4K. If this isn't great value, I don't know what is.

One of the themes of the AMD Zen architecture is basically to get the most performance out of the chip, and to handle power consumption, heat, and core usage well. This is one of the reasons why AMD's new CPUs are able to produce such great performance. Basically, AMD can handle your chip better than you can. This CPU is an exception to that rule. [Ryzen 5 5600X is a great overclocker.

This chip is 65W as opposed to all other Zen 3 chips which are 105W. With a third-party cooler, such as an all-in-one water-cooled cooler, you can push much more power than the chip's normal limit of 76W. We managed to set all cores to 4.7GHz at 1.3V (more impressively, 4.6GHz was also stable at 1.2V). We will look into this a bit more when we get a chance, but faster clocks and lower voltages should be quite possible.

We also found that Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO) provides a decent little boost, but as ever for overclocking these chips, PBO, Auto OC, or manual overclocking to 4.7GHz Either way, there seemed to be no impact on any of the games: in X264, the boost went from 39 fps to 42 fps, and in Cinebench, from 4,292 pts to 4,577 pts. Temperatures remained low even with overclocking, reaching a maximum of 76°C.

However, I would not recommend overclocking with the included cooler, as I recorded 87°C just using the PBO, and while I was tempted to try to see how far I could push the manual overclock on the Wraith Stealth, I would not be mean to this cooler. It's a little too respectful. It runs fine at stock clocks (up to 72°C under load) and cooler than that in most games, but overclocking is a bit beyond that grade. By the way, it's quiet in use and doesn't let anyone tell you any different.

The AMD Ryzen 5 5600X is an amazingly great gaming chip. While not a monster under serious workloads like more expensive chips, this chip only has 6 cores and 12 threads, which is plenty if you want to dabble in 3D rendering, video encoding, etc., but if that's your goal, you'll need to spend more money.

Where the Ryzen 5 5600X shines is definitely gaming; it's comparable to the Ryzen 9 5900X and Ryzen 7 5800X, but both are significantly cheaper at $299. This is a chip for those who enjoy gaming. It will go toe-to-toe with anything Intel has to offer and will satisfy your graphics card needs.

Coolers will not be able to reach the full potential of the 5600X until a more powerful cooler is thrown in, due to the way Precision Boost 2.0 works, but stock performance is not an issue. This is because it did not degrade gaming performance at all in our tests.

Overall, this is another win for the Zen 3 architecture and AMD. Yes, it is $50 more expensive, but that is offset by the cooler on board. More importantly, it is a win for us gamers.