AMD Ryzen 5 5600X Processor with Wraith Spire Cooler

The AMD Ryzen 5 5600X is a six-core, 12-thread processor with a base clock of 3.7GHz and max boost of 4.6GHz. It’s built up of a single core complex that has 32MB of L3 cache to call its own. And the same I/O die that can be found in Zen 2.

As with the other chips in the Zen 3 family, you’ll often see the boost clocks rise above the official 4.6GHz limit. Even using the Wraith Stealth cooler you’ll see the cores running at 4,650MHz. And with a water cooler 4.7GHz isn’t unheard of. If you’re using a fully-threaded application, then you’ll see them top out at 4,175MHz.

The 5600X has a 65W TDP, and limits itself to drawing 76W from the socket. That’s impressively low for a modern CPU, and means that there is the potential for some overclocking shenanigans if that’s your thing. This is an unlocked chip by the way, although you’re going to need a decent cooler to really exploit this fact.

The last thing to note is that the AMD official supports up to 3,200MHz DDR4 RAM. Although you’ll be able to run much faster memory without issue. The Infinity Fabric runs at 1,800MHz by default, so pairing it with 3,600MHz DDR4 makes sense. There is the potential for a faster Infinity Clock (FCLK) through BIOS updates in the future as well, although AMD isn’t guaranteeing this at launch.

Performance

Having looked at the 12-core 5900X and eight-core 5800X, it’s a bit of rude awakening to only have access to six cores again. This is still a powerhouse compared to Intel’s similarly priced 10600K though, with stronger figures in the X264 video encoding and Cinebench R20 3D rendering benchmarks. In fact the 5600X is closer to Intel’s 10700K, which is impressive given that is an eight-core CPU. The Zen architecture really has come on that much.