AMD Ryzen 5 9600X review

It's taken a while to get here—and it's honestly been a pretty bumpy road, too—but I'm pleased to present our review of the AMD Ryzen 5 9600X, the lowest-tier CPU currently on offer in AMD's Ryzen 9000 series family of Zen 5 processors. I'm not talking about the rocky situation where AMD recalled all stocks of the new Ryzen chips weeks before they were due to be sold, either—no, this is all about jumping around motherboards, updating firmware, and endlessly fiddling about with settings. All for what is actually a somewhat underwhelming new six-core CPU.

Anyway, let's just get down to specs business. The Ryzen 5 9600X is essentially a refreshed Ryzen 5 7600X, as it doesn't have any more cores or threads, there's no extra L3 cache, and even the boost clocks are barely any different. The only specs that are notably disparate are the base clocks (3.9 vs 4.7 GHz) and the TDPs (65 vs 105 W).

Deep down in the single CCD (Core Complex Die) chiplet, it's a very different story, as AMD has comprehensively changed all kinds of aspects of the architecture, with more L1 data cache, more L2 cache bandwidth, and much better vector and branch prediction units just being a few of them.

As we've already gone through the AMD Zen 5 architecture in detail, I won't reiterate it all for this review. It suffices to say that AMD has changed a lot, though time will tell if all those changes were really worth doing.

Cores: 6
Threads: 12
Base clock: 3.9 GHz
Boost clock: 5.4 GHz
L3 Cache: 32 MB
L2 Cache: 6 MB
Unlocked: Yes
Max PCIe lanes: 24
Graphics: Radeon Graphics
Memory support (up to): DDR5-5800
Processor Base Power (W): 65
Maximum Package Power (W): 88
Recommended customer price: $279/£269.99 

One important change that is worth mentioning is the fact that the CCDs, packed with 8.6 billion transistors, are now manufactured on TSMC's N4 process node—previously AMD used N5 and the newer fabrication method has much better transistor density and power demand.

And it's the latter that's the biggest