The AMD Ryzen 5 3600 is still an impressive CPU, but it will soon be supplanted by newer Ryzen 5000 processors. If you find the 3600 processor on sale at a steep discount during Black Friday or over the holidays, it’s still worth considering. Just know that this CPU does not include AMD’s latest Zen 3 architecture. So if you want the best single-core performance and other features that come with AMD’s newest CPUs, you should probably spend more for a Ryzen 5 5600X when it arrives in late 2020. Those new chips have now taken over the top ranks on our CPU Benchmark Hierarchy.
AMD’s value proposition has always been straightforward — more for less. While we typically think of AMD offering more CPU cores than Intel for less money, the strategy also applies to the company’s unrestrained feature sets for each processor, regardless of price. That includes in-box coolers, Hyper-Threading (AMD calls it SMT), and unlocked multipliers that enable easy overclocking, all of which are features that Intel either leaves out or disables on some of its chips in the name of segmentation.
