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.

AMD's next iteration on their very positively received Zen microarchitecture is preparing for take-off in the coming months, and as we draw ever close to the release date, more details are trickling in. This time, it's the appearance of a Ryzen 7 2700X (which supersedes the original Ryzen 7 1700X) on Futuremark's 3DMark database. The Ryzen 7 2700X was paired with an ASRock X370 Taichi motherboard (still considered one of the best ever to grace AMD's new AM4 platform), and its 8 cores and 16 threads are locked into a 3.7 GHz base and 4.1 GHz turbo clocks (respectively 300 MHz higher base and turbo clocks that the 1700X's).

The usage of AMD's XFR 2.0 (eXtended Frequency Range) and Precision Boost 2.0 could mean that the CPU is able, in certain scenarios, to turbo over the specified limit of 4.1 GHz, up to 4.2 GHz, thus delivering an even bigger boost to its performance. The usage of a 12 nm process means AMD has taken the power savings and increased frequency potential that comes from shrinking their original Zen microarchitecture, and put those to increased frequencies across the board, thus increasing their CPU's single-thread performance. Being an X chip,. AMD has kept the package TDP at a still respectable 95 W, much like its 1000 series Ryzens, though we know that this 95 W figure doesn't really spell out just how energy efficient these AMD CPUs really are.