Intel’s Core i5 has been the CPU of choice for the majority of gamers for almost a decade now. Traditionally, the i5-x600K has essentially been the i7-x700K without hyperthreading and slighly lower boost clocks. However, enthusiasts would easily make up for that by overclocking it. Hyperthreading or SMT has largely been inconsequential when it comes to gaming, so that’s never provided much incentive.

Since the coming of AMD’s Ryzen CPUs, a lot has changed. Core i5s are now hex-core chips while i7s are octa-core parts, both lacking hyperthreading. Things has become especially dire for Intel since the Ryzen 3000 lineup was launched. The first two generations still lagged behind contemporary Core processors in gaming workloads but that is not the case anymore.

The result: the CPU space has become a lot more competitive with the pricing of the budget parts lower than ever. AMD has adopted a two-pronged approach with respect to the midrange and high-end consumer CPU space. The Core i5-9600K is attacked by the Ryzen 5 3600 and the 3600X while the i7-9700K is left to compete with the Ryzen 7 3700X and the 3800X. One chip performs slightly lower in gaming but much better in everything else while costing less but the other beats the Intel competitor in both gaming as well as non-gaming workloads while costing the same or sometimes even less.

This can make it quite hard to pick the right CPU. In this post, we compare the Ryzen 5 3600X and the Core i5-9600K and see how the two chips stack against one another in gaming and other day-to-day workloads.

Specifications

Looking at the specs, on paper the Ryzen 5 3600X has one major advantage, namely SMT. Luckily for Intel, most games don’t make leverage SMT or HT. The 9600K has a higher boost clock which will be helpful in single-threaded games. Then there’s the cache. The Ryzen 3000 CPUs feature a fat L3 cache, something AMD calls GameCache.

This essentially makes up for the delay caused by the Infinity Fabric. The impact of CPU cache on game performance is rather notable and can be observed by examining Intel’s Broadwell parts. Despite being more or less similar to Haswell, they perform much better in gaming workloads.

Testbench

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600X/ Intel Core i5-9600K
• Motherboard: ASRock Taichi X570/ ROG Strix Z390-E Gaming
• GPU: ASUS GeForce RTX 2080 Ti
• RAM: Trident Z Royal 16GB @ 3200MHz

AMD Ryzen 5 3600X vs Intel Core i5-9600K: Gaming Benchmarks

Looking at the gaming benchmarks, it’s clear that newer DirectX12 titles favor AMD’s Ryzen 5 3600X while older games still benefit largely from the Core i5’s higher core clocks. In Shadow of the Tomb Raider and The Division 2, the 3600X edges past the Core i5-9600K but in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, a relatively older title, the Coffee Lake part manages to eke out a win. Moving on to Ashes, the Ryzen 5 3600X once again beats the Core i5 by a significant margin.

Overall, as you can see, the two CPUs are mostly on par with each other when it comes to gaming workloads. You can expect better performance from the Core i5-9600K in DX11 titles while recent ones will see the Ryzen 5 level with it or even beat it.

For the sake of relevance, let’s have a look at some common workloads used in day-to-day computing.

7-Zip is one of those applications that will leverage as many threads as you throw at it, so the 3600X wins big here. This is one of the few workloads where SMT plays a big role.

Kraken is known to favor higher cache sizes, and on that account the Ryzen 5 marks another win. Rendering workloads like Indigobench and Cinebench on the other are AMD’s hometurf. Here the 3600X leads by a notable margin.

Conclusion

It’s not hard to see which CPU is better. In the higher-end space, the Core i7-9700K and 9900K edge past the Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 9 but there it appears that AMD’s midrange options offer identical performance in gaming workloads, pretty much rendering the 9600K obsolete.

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