AMD Ryzen 5 5600 review

We recently reviewed the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D and declared it as one of the best gaming processors. However, at US$ 449, it's not a processor everyone will want to go for.

Along with the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, AMD also released a few other processors and today we're looking at one that sits at a much more affordable price point- the AMD Ryzen 5 5600.

AMD Ryzen 5 5600: price and availability

• When is it available? May 2022
• How much will it cost? MSRP is $199 which is AED 730 / SAR 750.
• Will I need to buy a new motherboard? It will fit most AM4 motherboards from X470 and B450 onward.

The AMD Ryzen 5 5600 has been launched with an MSRP of $199 which is around AED 730 in the UAE and SAR 750 in Saudi Arabia. We haven't seen the processor in stock at local retailers as of yet but expect are expecting it to be available soon.

Compared to the Ryzen 5 5600X released last year, that's a drop of $100 in pricing for essentially the same processor. It has the same underlying Zen 3 architecture with six cores / twelve threads and slightly lower base and boost clock speeds. This makes the Ryzen 5 5600 quite an attractive purchase.

From a competing standpoint, the AMD Ryzen 5 5600 is priced around the Intel Core i5-12500 series of processors. Do keep in mind that those Intel processors feature integrated graphics.

Specs and features

The AMD Ryzen 5 5600 uses the AM4 socket with DDR4 and PCIe 4.0 which means that you don't really need to upgrade your components if you're only upgrading the CPU. Having said that, this isn't necessarily a processor you would upgrade to- the higher end Ryzen 7 5800X3D would be more suited for an upgrade. 

The Ryzen 5 5600 is a better processor if you're planning on building a new mid-end PC with a limited budget in mind.  The one thing to take note of is that this processor lacks integrated graphics. You will need an external GPU when building a PC with the AMD Ryzen 5 5600 and ideally, that would be something mid-range along the lines of the Radeon 6600XT.

Testing and Performance

• Good overall performance
• No integrated GPU
• Supports AM4 platform

To measure the performance of the AMD Ryzen 5 5600, we used the ASUS ROG Strix B550-I Gaming motherboard. This motherboard is about a year old, however, it supports everything that AMD's latest processor is capable of. 

For RAM, we used 2x16GB Corsair's Vengeance Pro RGB and the Samsung 980 Pro 500GB SSD. The graphics card used was the Radeon RX 6600-XT.

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Starting off with the purely synthetic benchmarks Geekbench 5 and Cinebench R23, what's to note here is the excellent single core performance of the Ryzen 5 5600. We don't have an Intel Core i5 12500 series processor which is what the AMD Ryzen 5 5600 is positioned against but compared to the higher-end and more expensive processors, the Ryzen 5 5600 does quite well.

Multi-core benchmarks are expected lower as the Ryzen 5 5600 has lesser number of cores.

Moving to PC Mark 10 which is also a synthetic benchmark but combines scenarios that are applicable to every day usage, we see a strong performance by the Ryzen 5 5600. Again, we don't have equivalent Intel processors to measure this but looking at the publicly available database of PC Mark 10 results, the Intel Core i5-12500 has an average score of 7117 which is similar to how the Ryzen 5 5600 performs.

Moving on to 3D Mark Time Spy CPU score, the Ryzen 5 5600 scored on the lower side but in line with what is expected for a processor at this price point.

Coming to an actual game, the average FPS of 281 on Total War is an impressive score from a mid-end CPU.

Overall, we are impressed by the benchmarks posted by the AMD Ryzen 5 5600. It certainly punches above its price grade.

Should I buy an AMD Ryzen 5 5600?

Buy it if...

Don't buy it if...

First reviewed in June 2022