I'm considering upgrading from a Ryzen 5 3600 to a Ryzen 5 5600 or 5600X. My system has an RX 7600 and 32GB of DDR4 memory, and I mainly play games at 1080p. Tray CPUs are much cheaper where I live: the 5600 costs €104 and the 5600X costs €120. I'm also planning to use an Arctic Freezer 36 cooler. Since I don't expect to upgrade the CPU again, is the 5600X worth the extra €16, or would the regular 5600 provide essentially the same performance? A Ryzen 7 5700X is available for €151, but that's stretching my budget.
4 Answers
At this price difference, either option is reasonable, but the 5600X is not a major upgrade over the 5600. Save the money or put it toward another component. Make sure the tray CPU includes whatever warranty coverage is available, and your planned cooler will be more than adequate for either chip.
One correction: the 5600 and 5600X both have 32MB of L3 cache. The lower-cache models people sometimes confuse them with are the Ryzen 5 5500 and Ryzen 7 5700. The 5600X does not get a gaming advantage from extra cache—only from its modestly higher clocks.
The Ryzen 5 5600X is only slightly faster than the 5600—usually around 1–5%, depending on the game and settings. Both chips have 32MB of L3 cache; the difference is mainly the higher clock speed. For an RX 7600, especially at 1080p, the difference generally won’t be very noticeable, so I’d choose the 5600 unless the €16 is insignificant to you.
If you want a more meaningful long-term improvement over the Ryzen 5 3600, a Ryzen 7 5700X would be more worthwhile because it has eight cores instead of six. However, for gaming with an RX 7600, the 5600 is still a sensible budget choice, and the 5700X may not justify exceeding your budget.
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