The Ryzen 5 3600XT is the third of three XT chips AMD has announced and, spoiler alert, probably the best. It is, however, only slightly better. A quick glance at the scores will tell you that it's not perfect. Ultimately, it comes down to the fact that a slight boost clock improvement and a refined manufacturing process are not enough to justify a slightly higher price tag than the Ryzen 5 3600X.

Unlike other XT chips released a year after AMD released its first Zen 2 processor, the Ryzen 5 3600XT at least comes with a cooler. In this case, it comes with the Wraith Spire model, which does not have the RGB aesthetic of the top-end bundled coolers, but does a decent job of keeping the chip in check. More details will follow.

As already noted, the 3600XT is slightly more expensive than the 3600X, but this is due to the market dropping the price of the 3600X, with the two chips ostensibly priced the same, at least on paper, at $249. But you can get the 3600X for $224 anywhere. What do you get for that $25? A 100MHz boost clock increase and as much additional overclocking performance as you can squeeze out of the chip if you're willing to take on the silicon lottery gods.

It's less at $25, but that's not the real issue. The problem with the original 3600X, and rightfully so for the 3600XT, is that the 3600 (in the absence of a suffix) is probably the best value Zen 2 chip in existence (though the Ryzen 5 3300X is arguably even better). This is why it is listed in our Best CPUs for Gaming guide. [although it is slightly slower with a base clock of 3.6 GHz and a boost clock of 4.2 GHz (the 3600X is clocked at 3.8/4.4 GHz and the new 3600XT at 3.8/4.5 GHz).

Basically, the Ryzen 5 3600XT has to pull off something special in terms of performance to justify the price difference ($78) from AMD's mid-range superchip. [Looking at the benchmarks, the Ryzen 5 3600XT has two entries, one using the same all-in-one cooler we used to test other XT chips, and the other using the included Wraith Spire cooler. Most buyers of this chip will want to use the included cooler, but for those buyers it will be interesting to see what difference the AIO makes in performance.

In this regard, it is worth noting that the Wraith Spire reached a temperature of 87°C during the test. On the other hand, the maximum temperature of the AIO cooler was 78°C. As can be seen, at the same time performance was slightly improved.

However, the difference is quite slight, and looking at benchmarks, the only test that really shows what a slightly higher boost clock can do is the single-threaded Cinebench R20 benchmark. those interested in 3D rendering will probably not want to limit themselves to single-threaded. While that may not be the point of this test, the idea is that the Ryzen 5's best feature is its 6-core, 12-thread capability, not its single-threaded performance. Will this affect gaming in the same way? It is time to find out.

Comparisons with the 3600X and 3600 do a good job in showing that the 3600XT actually shows significant performance gains in some games. There is a clear trend between these chips, with the performance of the Wraith Spire cooler fitting surprisingly well into the gap between the AIO cooler and the 3600X. The F1 2019 results illustrate this well, especially when looking at minimum frame rates.

However, not all games show the same performance difference: in Far Cry New Dawn at 4K, there is little difference between the chips; the responsibility for 4K performance lies entirely with the choice of GPU, and in fact, the three 3600 and Intel's new Core i5 10600K There is only a 3 fps difference between the two. So depending on the title you play and the resolution, you may see a 10% improvement over the 3600 or no improvement at all. The more thread-aware the game is, the smaller the performance difference basically becomes.

While AMD's bundling of the Wraith Spire cooler with the 3600XT is a welcome addition, and we know that running it with AIO will give you higher performance (and lower temperatures), such a cooler is a significant part of the budget. If you are at this end of the market, not everyone wants that. Upgrading the cooler will guarantee higher performance right from the start. [But in the end, despite its promise, the Ryzen 5 3600XT will suffer the same fate as the Ryzen 9 3900XT and Ryzen 7 3800XT; in the case of the 3600XT, the problem lies with the vanilla Ryzen 5 3600. This is simply a great mid-range chip that offers great value for money, and can't really compete with chips that cost $78 more but offer an average of only 5% more performance. if you want a 3600XT-class CPU, get the Ryzen 5 3600.