The AMD Ryzen 5 3600XT has to be the most impressive of the three Ryzen 3000XT processors AMD released today, as it gets the closest to realizing the design goals of the 3000XT series. Ryzen 3000XT adds fresh wind to the company's product stack in the wake of Intel restoring competition to the segment with its 10th Gen Core "Comet Lake" processors. Intel leverages the full potential of "Skylake" CPU cores, complete with HyperThreading, increased clocks, and vastly increased power limits to post significant performance gains in all segments. The fine-print of Intel's revival story, though, is that "Comet Lake" only achieves small gaming leads over AMD, which feels this lead can be slimmed down using existing "Zen 2" technology, without having to wait for "Zen 3."

On paper, the Ryzen 5 3600XT looks like an insignificant 100 MHz speed-bump over the 3600X, with 3.80 GHz base and up to 4.50 GHz boost frequencies. There's more to this chip than its on-paper frequencies. AMD has worked with TSMC to improve the transistors in the CCD compute cores, using the existing 7 nm (N7) foundry node to yield a single-digit percentage efficiency gain, which lets them clock the CPU higher for longer. This should benefit single-threaded or lightly-threaded workload performance. Normally, we'd expect gaming to fit this description.

Speaking of gaming performance, we see the Ryzen 5 3600XT post a 0.5%–1.5% increase in gaming performance over the 3600 and 3600X, while being 7.4% behind the Core i5-10600K. This lead Intel has over the 3600XT narrows to 3.5% at 1440p and 1.3% at 4K UHD, as the performance bottleneck shifts toward the GPU. This only paints part of the story as the academically relevant 720p testing reveals a 13% performance gap between the two chips. 720p presents a CPU-bottleneck scenario and highlights that the i5-10600K would come through with that much more performance if the GPU isn't saturated. At least for gaming, the i5-10600K has the upper hand. Even the Core i5-10500 ends up slightly ahead of the 3600XT.

AMD's Ryzen 5 3600XT is more compelling with compute, where it trades blows with the 8-core i7-10700 and previous-gen Ryzen 7 2700X in Maxon Cinebench, Blender, and KeyShot. It also beats the i5-10600K in software development and game engine tests, and the Intel chips are insignificantly faster at web-related tasks. Overall, the Intel Core i5-10600K is just 2% faster than the Ryzen 5 3600XT, which in turn is 2% faster than the Ryzen 5 3600X. If you look at individual results, there are quite some differences, always best if you know your workload.

Overclocking benefits the Ryzen 5 3600XT the most among the three Ryzen 3000XT chips we reviewed today. We were able to obtain a stable 4.50 GHz all-core OC on water, 4.4 GHz on air. This is a noteworthy improvement over the 4.2 GHz maximum we got on Ryzen 5 3600X, and impressive by AMD's standards. In the compute tests, the overclocked 3600XT ends up 1.3% faster than the stock 3600XT, and just 0.8% behind the i5-10600K. Overclocking also improves 720p frame rates by 1.2%. The 4.50 GHz OC definitely requires high voltage; we could only tame it using a 240 mm AIO. Our standard 4.4 GHz on air OC was super easy on the other hand, just set the multiplier, adjust voltage a bit and you're good to go. Actually, at 4.4 manual OC, our CPU ran cooler and more efficient than the stock CPU due to lower voltage.

Speaking of power, we see the 3rd generation Ryzen 5 series in general mop the floor with the 10th Gen Core i5 series, specifically in multi-threaded performance. This is where Intel pays the cost of sticking to 14 nm. The i5-10600K pulls 18 W more power than the 3600XT under multi-threaded test loads, although when gaming, the power draw is actually some 4 W lower. Single-threaded workloads is an even split between Intel and AMD. As we mentioned earlier, overclocking doesn't adversely affect power draw as long as you don't go overboard with voltages, and in fact lowers it in some cases. Intel chips are more energy efficient in single-threaded scenarios, and AMD chips in multi-threaded. Suffice to say, AMD is no longer second-figure to Intel when it comes to power. They have surpassed them since the switch to 7 nm.

Now then, should you buy an AMD Ryzen 5 3600XT? At $250, the answer to this question is complex. $265 gets you the Intel Core i5-10600K, which ends up slightly behind the 3600XT in price-performance, but yields 2% more compute performance, and a good 1.3%–3.5% higher frame rates in 1440p and 4K UHD resolutions. At $200, the dark horse of this review is the Ryzen 5 3600X, which the 3600XT attempts to succeed in AMD's product stack, posting 19% higher price-performance. The Ryzen 5 3600, much like the i5-10400F, offers over 40% higher price-performance thanks to excellent pricing. Before you jump the gun on an i5-10600K, though, you should take a look at the Ryzen 7 3700X, which is going for around $275 these days, just $10 more, but offers two more cores, similar gaming performance, but significantly better multi-threaded performance, and a Wraith Prism cooler. Given the 3600X is hovering around $200 these days, $230 would have been a better price for the 3600XT. No amount of overclocking the 3600XT can get it to match the 3700X. Your decision to pick the 3600XT over the i5-10600K should hence ride on other factors, such as M.2 PCIe gen 4.0 future-proofing or you falling woefully short of just $25 to pick up a 3700X. On the technical side, the Ryzen 5 3600XT is a great CPU, what's holding it back is pricing. If only its price premium over the 3600X were $20 instead of $50, I would definitely be willing to spend the extra money on this chip, and we'd give it our recommended award.