Review: AMD Ryzen 5 3600XT

Introduction

Our recent look at two of the three new Ryzen 3000-series XT chips revealed that value wasn't the keenest play, hampered as it was by significant price premiums over X parts. We now turn our attention to the Ryzen 5 3600XT, which promises the same small gains over the regular 3600X through the use of improved 7nm silicon, but with a more amenable street price and a cooler in the box - potentially righting two wrongs present on the Ryzen 9 3900XT and Ryzen 7 3800XT.

The specs reveal the only difference between the XT and X chips is a higher peak boost speed of 4.5GHz vs. 4.4GHz. The devil is in the details, however, as our sample chip averages 4,236MHz under all-core load, compared to 4,105MHz for the Ryzen 5 3600X installed in the same motherboard, on the same day, and using exactly the same cooling. This is a direct result of AMD having a better voltage/frequency curve for the new 7nm process.

Even so, that extra 120MHz isn't going to set the benchmark world alight. Sensible predictions suggest a 2-5 percent performance advantage over the regular chip across a wide range of applications. Even so, the £240 street fee is still a fair bit higher than the £205 now charged for the 3600X, and one wonders if the extra £35 or so, representing a 17 percent premium, makes sense when talking about chips in this segment.

For example, that £35 is close to the difference between a 500GB and 1TB WD Blue SN550 NVMe, or between 8GB and 16GB of DDR4 memory from Corsair. It's these kinds of choices that anyone considering the Ryzen 5 3600XT will have to make when budget is understandably limited.

We reckon AMD ought to have included this chip in the Assassin's Creed Valhalla Equipped To Win promotion (leaving regular 3600X out), but this is not the case as that's limited to Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 9 chips alone.

Let's now see how the extra frequency oomph of Ryzen 5 3600XT expresses itself in our benchmarks.