AMD Ryzen 5 5600X Review: Rising Above

AMD’s dominance in the current PC market and their resurgence has been nothing short of impressive in the past couple of years. And they may continue their dominance thanks to the 5th Generation of Ryzen CPUs. We got our hands on the Ryzen 5 5600X and we gotta say, it’s powerful. Generation after generation, AMD has improved on their CPUs and this is no different. The sheer power this CPU has now has been something AMD has slowly worked on over the past few years. Now, without further ado, let’s get right into.

Technical Specifications

The Ryzen 5600X is a 6 core 12 thread CPU with a base clock of 3.7Ghz that boosts upto 4.6Ghz. Thanks to its increase in IPC (which we’ll see in a bit) these clock speeds are fast enough to handle everything you throw at them while also being able to outperform its competitors. This is also the only 5th Generation Ryzen CPU so far that comes with a box cooler. It’s 7nm also means a very low TDP of 65W and the heat generated from it is also easily managed by the included Wraith Stealth cooler. The thing that surprised us about this CPU is that while it was outperforming the 3600X, it was also able to get close to or even match the performance of the 3rd Generation Ryzen 7 CPUs in certain games and benchmarks. That is quite insane given that it is working with less cores and threads. But more on that head to head later.

Test System

Game Benchmarks

Onwards to what we’re all here for, the benchmarks. Now, let me get it out of the way and tell you that this CPU surprised us in a great way. All the benchmarks here were done at 1080p with the High Quality preset (or it’s equivalent).

It blasts through every single game at 1080p when paired with an RX 6800 or a 3080. Even Ashes of the Singularity’s heavy benchmarks gives us a fantastic result. So if you’re a gamer who wants to play games at a higher refresh rate at 1080p, this CPU will be plenty enough. Even at 1440p, this CPU scales quite well and will not be the bottleneck on the system even with an RX 6800.

Synthetic Benchmarks

While this CPU is primarily aimed at folks who only want to play games, the 5600X is no slouch when it comes to content creation and synthetic workloads. As we’ll see from the benchmark numbers, this 5600X not only outperforms the competitors and predecessors but also punches above it’s weight when it comes it single-threaded performance.

In Cinebench’s singlecore benchmark, it beats the i5-10600K (501 points) and the Ryzen 7 3800XT (544 points). In the multicore benchmark it beats the i5-10600K (3,610) quite handily and is very close to the Ryzen 7 3700X (4,825) which has more cores and threads than it.

When it comes to Blender (lower score is better), it beats the i5-10600K (4,766) and the 3600XT (4,466). And finally, when transcoding a4K HEVC video to 1080p60 video, the 10600K takes 537 seconds, the 3600XT takes 481 seconds while the 5600X finishes before them at just 453 seconds.

Pricing and Conclusion

The Ryzen 5 5600X costs INR 27,000 after GST with the suggested retail price being INR 22,990. This pricing means that it enters the same price range as the Ryzen 7 3700X that costs around INR 28,000-30,000 and has more cores and threads. But thing is that the 5600X has much better raw performance and is focused at those who only want to play games. So is it priced bad? Not necessarily.

AMD had stated that the 3rd generation of CPUs will not be discontinued after the 5th Generation launches. AMD wants to give the consumer the choice between more cores and threads or better performance gaming performance at the same price point. If a person doesn’t want to create content then the 5600X but if they do need more cores at a same price point with a drop in performance, they still have an option.

And this brings us to the conclusion. Options is something that AMD is going all out on in this generation. Consumers asked AMD for more powerful singlethreaded performance and they’ve delivered. Now it’s up to the consumers to decide what they want to pick and that to me, as a consumer is always a good choice to have. The Ryzen 5600X is an absolute gaming monster that even keeps up with the higher-end i9-10900K when it comes to gaming. And this type of power will definitely help gamers who want to ready their PC as the new generation of consoles comes out and the standard of games starts to exponentially rise again.