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GPUs and CPUs · AMD Ryzen

AMD Ryzen 3600

13owners with an opinion
75%of verdicts positive
2/1positive/negative since 2024
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for performance and value; criticized for reliability and software.

What people wrote

Neutral
It’s hard to take you seriously if you’re going to claim equivalent AMD processors cost double or more. Your example of tossing your motherboard away is not a very good one here. That was your choice to act illogically. My AMD AM4 motherboard started with a Ryzen 1600, 3600, and now runs a 5600X3D. Basically I’ve had this same motherboard for something like 6 or 7 years and the performance difference between a Ryzen 1600 and 5600X3D is completely wild. I’ve had no need to buy a new board for the better part of a decade. If you’re buying a new board with every processor purchase that’s a huge cost difference. When I say that generic benchmarks are bad I mean that cpu benchmarks like the one you are just now linking are bad. You need more practical benchmarks like in-game FPS, how long a turn takes in Stellaris, how long it takes to encode a video or open an ZIP file, etc. That is where the X3D chips play in as well. You might be able to buy an Intel chip with more cores and better productivity performance, but if you’re eyeing gaming performance like I imagine most desktop DIY builders are, you’d rather get better gaming oriented performance and sacrifice some productivity performance. If you are gaming and buy a 9800X3D, Intel literally doesn’t not make anything faster at any price. You can offer Intel $5,000 and they won’t have anything to sell you that goes faster at playing games. At lower price points, AMD still ends up making a lot of sense for their long-supported socke…
Likes it
This feels like a load of baloney to me. My most non-technical web browsing Microsoft Word-using relatives went from a 2012 Mac mini to an M4 Mac mini and the difference was night and day. They were extremely enthusiastic about the end result. If they can tell it’s faster then certainly a technical person like myself can. And also, that was an incredibly cheap upgrade. In 12 years they went from one $600 computer to another $600. That’s right, the new one was the same price, so cheaper than the original after inflation, they’ve paid $50 a year to compute, and that’s on the world’s most premium brand of computers. Sure, you don’t need to upgrade anything. And for now, the Ryzen 3600 is a fantastic “old” processor, it runs my game server and it’s certainly capable. But it’s not like you wouldn’t notice a far better experience someday in the future with an upgrade.
Neutral
You don't need to wait for Valve to get this experience today. The HTPC build of Bazzite [1] brings an experience identical to SteamOS to all computers with an AMD or Intel GPU from the past 8 years or so. It works amazingly well and I can't imagine going back to Windows for a PC that is built only for video games. I use it on my "Gaming HTPC" (Ryzen 3600, Radeon RX6600, Fractal Design Node 202) and it brings a great console experience to my TV, with access to my PC game library, without being locked into a console ecoystem, and without the enormous cruft and user hostility that Windows has you manage these days. I'm a pretty casual and patient gamer, and for that use case this Steam machine experience is unmatched - despite being built on desktop Linux, it works out of the box and requires zero manual maintenance. For dedicated gaming boxes this Linux user experience is significantly better and easier to use than Windows - we're truly living in the future. [1]: https://bazzite.gg [2]: It's built on top of Fedora and Universal Blue, so under the hood it's different from SteamOS which is built on a custom immutable version of Arch Linux. However, that implementation detail is actually almost totally irrelevant if you want to play games since all software is managed by Steam and Flatpak on both systems.
Likes it
I don’t find that to be all that impressive. I’m immediately saving money with the server I built out of mostly used parts and threw in my closet compared to VPS solutions. The only reason it’s near 100% utilization is because $5 VPS instances have barely any computing power assigned to them. For the same price as one game server I’m running something like 5-8 VMs at once. I can utilize 128GB of RAM and 6/12 real CPU cores (Ryzen 3600).
Likes it
The Ryzen 3000 series ("matisse") is less than 5 years old, with the models coming out in late 2019 and 2020. To not issue a fix for those is very disappointing. I just built a gaming PC with a Ryzen 3600. It is more than sufficient to run modern games with demanding graphics and performance. I now need to learn about this exploit. Yes, if someone gets the level of access required to exploit it I was pwned anyway, but now if I get pwned I need to open up my computer and throw away a perfectly powerful CPU, then put it back together with a new one. That's pretty damn frustrating. It will definitely push me away from AMD when I am making future hardware decision. EDIT: As pointed out by sqeaky and others, there shouldn't be a method for persistence that lives on the processor, instead it would likely be on the motherboard, or in the bootloader on a storage device.
Doesn’t like it
I would consider 45 fps "solid" for my needs. I rarely saw it dip below 30 for me That said I did see some weird framerates on my AMD system... standing on the bridge of your ship overlooking the planet tanked the framerate hard. It has a 2070 Super and a ryzen 5 3600. But that system is in the living room and used like a game console, and I find Helldivers pretty unplayable with a controller, so I dont use it much
Likes it
Don't ignore that "idle" isn't a real thing. Most Reddit users complaining about high idle consumption have a program causing the problem. For me, shutting down the Steam program took my Ryzen 3600 from 22 watts "idle" to 2 watts idle. There is no such thing as idle in a modern desktop.
Likes it
Also hurts that Intel changes socket every 5 min. I sold everything before a move and I’m looking to get a pc again. I’m looking at the used market to see if I can get a good deal and I’m surprised that the same motherboard generation I sold (Ryzen 3600) supports a 5800 that runs pretty decently today. I guess it was a good buy back in 2018. I think if I buy new I’ll go ddr5, otherwise I’ll stick with whatever is around. But people in the bay are trying to pay rent with their PCs and want way too much for the age of components they have. Back on the east coast the same pcs go for 200 less at least. Makes negotiation a bit difficult.
Likes it
I’ve been using llama.cpp to try out some large-ish models on my cpu for a while now. I’m on an amd 3600, with 32gb ram. I can run 30B 4bit and 5bit models. It’s definitely “usable” but smaller models definitely run faster. I don’t have a good graphics card, but it does work on cpu. With more ram I think the 65B and larger models are runnable as well
Neutral
This is incredibly scary. On my Zen 2 box (Ryzen 3600) logging the output of the exploit running as an unprivileged user while copying and pasting a string into a text editor in the background (I used Kate), resulted in pieces of the string being logged into the output of zenbleed. And this is after a few seconds of runtime mind you, not even a full minute. Thankfully the exploit is highly dependent on a specific asm routine so exploiting it from JS or WASM in a browser should be extremely difficult. Otherwise a nefarious tab left open for hours in the background could exfiltrate without an issue. I'm eagerly waiting for Fedora maintainers to push the new microcode so the kernel can update it during the boot process.
Neutral
Same here. My NUC eats around 18W when idle, which translates to ~58 Euros a year in electricity costs. (serves mostly as a NAS for Plex) 10x that in costs would be quite significant, and my desktop idles easily above 100W. (Ryzen 5 3600 and GTX 1650Super) When I'm productive, I get to around 0.5-0.8€ a day of electricity costs with the PC, and gaming for just a few hours occasionally puts me above 1€/day.