AMD Ryzen 5 5600 review

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Introduction

Ryzen 5 5600 processor review
AMD's most value $199 USD will happily assist as a PC Gaming CPU

AMD just announced non-X SKUs of numerous CPUs, which is extremely late to the market. Today we'll take a look at the AMD Ryzen 5 5600. Although the CPU has a fixed multiplier, it is still set with 6 cores and 12 threads. With a base frequency of 3.50GHz and boost rates of up to 4.40GHz, this boxed CPU costs only 199 EUR and may be a great value for a fantastic gaming system.


ZEN3 series processors

ZEN, of course, is the codename behind the processor architecture. ZEN3 promised an updated architecture with increased IPC (raw core for clock performance) combined with the now-familiar chiplet designs that offer better yields. AMD has been continuously pushing the limits of the chip-fabrication foundries, and sure, 7nm production has been a sweet spot for AMD. They produce good yields ever since the initial launch. Yields are good because of that chiplet design; see when you fab monolithic and only get 30 chips from a wafer with a 60% yield, you end up with 18 working die's. When you use chiplets (multiple chips per package), you can fab perhaps 200 chips per wafer, and with the same yield ratio, you all of a sudden have 120 working die's. And therein is part of the secret sauce to be found in AMD's recent successes. 

Gaming king?

A lot has been said and spoken about Ryzen 5000, or the artists are previously known as ZEN3; AMD single and multi-threaded performance have been great overall but have been struggling a bit more with high FPS and CPU bound games. That last bit is not solely due to the processor, as the gaming industry has been on an Intel intravenous drip for a decade and optimized their procs the best. This thesis is wider than that as AMD has had architectural disadvantages in its processor design, the cluster design, I should say. AMD's ZEN and ZEN2 processor dies each holds 8-cores. However, within that real estate, you'll have learned that these eight cores are clustered in two groups of four. In there are some latency issues to be found as the two 4-core partitions communicate with more latency; it's part of the root cause of that gaming differential. The solution to that last hurdle is often twofold; the first is to brute force your way out of there with increased IPC (your raw per clock cycle performance). You can do that by making more efficient buffers, and caches, basically creating stronger performing cores. Of course, a second methodology is something we see at Intel, raise that clock frequency as high as possible. Overall, Intel is King of High turbo clock frequencies but a notch weaker in IPC. On the other hand, AMD has been powerful on IPC but less so in that absolute peak clock frequency. Now it isn't that AMD processors perform badly in games, as that isn't the truth whatsoever, but that lacking 5% or 10% game performance in the most extreme situations (GeForce RTX 3090 / CPU bound games / high FPS games), no it's the fact that they could not pass Intel in that segment. That has been haunting them and, in the end, is something that the more enthusiast end-user would stare himself blind at. It also created a reputation, a stigma of some sort, and no matter how good the processor series and its infrastructure have been, the first thing that people ask me is this 'is it faster than Intel in games'. Thanks to an IPC increase and a fundamental change in the architectural move from two four-core clusters within a die towards one fully unified 8-core cluster. Then came Alder Lake, these Intel processors do brilliant stuff for game performance.

This article uses a base narrative for all our Ryzen 5000 processors reviews. In this article we test:

  • Ryzen 5 5600 (6c/12t) priced at 199 USD

We’ll go into detail on the next pages. The Ryzen 3000 series 5, 7, and 9 processors are six up-to sixteen-core processors, competitively priced combined with a proper performance increase over the last generation products. 


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