El Chapuzas Informático has posted an early review of the AMD Ryzen 5 3600 which was tested on a Gigabyte Aorus Gaming 7 WiFi motherboard, G.Skill FlareX DDR4 @ 3200 MHz and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti FE graphics card. Looking at the data presented, it becomes clear the performance on offer if real looks to be quite impressive. The site compared AMD's latest offering to the Intel Core i9-9900K and the AMD Ryzen 7 2700X with the Ryzen 5 3600 typically slotting in between the two and in some cases beating both. This is interesting to note as the Ryzen 7 2700X offers similar clock speeds to the Ryzen 5 3600 but the former has a 2C/4T advantage. Even so, the newer AMD CPU tends to outpace the Zen+ based Ryzen 7 2700X in multiple tests. In Cinebench R15, for example, the Ryzen 5 3600 had the lead in single-core performance while multi-core was held by the Ryzen 7 2700X. Cinebench R20 roughly mimics these results as well.

While memory latency was quite high 80.5 ns, it didn't seem to impact performance to any serious degree. In fact, in wPrime 2.10 32M running on a single core showed the Ryzen 5 3600 coming in just behind the Intel Core i9-9900K while being faster than the previous generation Intel Core i7-8700K, i7-8600K, and AMD Ryzen 7 2700X and 1700X. That said, the previous generation Ryzen processors were far slower here were as the Intel chips were still competitive. In the multi-core test, the Ryzen 7 2700X took a slight lead while the Ryzen 7 1700X was a bit slower than the Ryzen 5 3600. One interesting quirk of note was the lack of write speed on the memory with the Ryzen 5 3600 only hitting 25.6 GB/s which is quite a drop from the 47 GB/s seen on the Ryzen 7 1700X and Ryzen 7 2700X. However this could be due to the X470 motherboard being used or maybe an issue with sub timings on the memory, something that will need to be verified in future reviews.Other than that, the Ryzen 5 3600 proves to be a capable processor. While not quite on par with the Intel Core i9-9900K in gaming tests, it does get quite close and typically beats the Ryzen 7 2700X. While the margins of victory are not staggering, it's still good to see as it does show an improvement since the Ryzen 5 3600 does have a lower clock speed and fewer cores and threads compared to the previous generation. If these chips are decent overclockers, they may prove quite interesting for mid-range gaming builds since they Ryzen 5 3600 has an MSRP of $199. Considering other AMD processors in the lineup can boost up to 4.6 GHz, these mid-range Ryzen chips could be quite the gaming CPUs as a potential 400 MHz overclock would likely let them close the gap with Intel's far more expensive unlocked processors.You can check the full review at the source below, and while the results appear plausible, we suggest taking them with a grain of salt.

Update Jun 26th: El Chapuzas Informático has posted a follow up review, using a motherboard with X570 chipset. Looks like the differences are only minor.