AMD Ryzen 5 3600XT CPU Review – 4.6GHz OC!

Our Ryzen 5 3600XT sample managed 4.6GHz all-core frequency using 1.35V and Mode 3 LLC on our MSI B550 Tomahawk motherboard. We increased the voltage as high as 1.375V but could not muster stability beyond 4.6GHz.

Equally so, we tried to decrease the voltage whilst maintaining 4.6GHz on all cores but the Blender and Handbrake H264 tests specifically were not happy at 1.325V. Other tests such as games and even Cinebench were happy at 1.325V but we ran 1.35V throughout testing simply for extra stability and because temperatures were fine.

We were very impressed to see 4.6GHz with reasonable thermals on all six cores for our Ryzen 5 3600XT sample. This is a superb overclocking result for Zen 2 and is around 200MHz higher than we typically see from Ryzen 5 3600 or 3600X manual overclocks. 4.6GHz also highlights that our six-core XT sample’s silicon quality is comparable to 8-core 3800XT chip that also ran at 4.6GHz for our testing.

Temperatures were manageable with a 280mm AIO, though the AIDA stress test did push to the 90°C mark within seconds of loading.

Importantly, there is no downside to this manual overclock of 4.6GHz. That is because both the all-core and typical 1T boost clock speeds were less than 4.6GHz for the stock frequency testing.

Provided you can maintain stability and reasonable temperatures, the 4.6GHz all-core overclock will deliver clock speed improvements in multi-threaded, lightly threaded, and single-threaded workloads. That’s a key benefit over the Ryzen 5 3600X whereby a user would typically have to pick between elevated single-threaded clock speeds of Precision Boost 2/Overdrive OR better all-core frequencies from a manual overclock.

We also had a look at pushing the Infinity Fabric clock speed and managed to hit 1900MHz using 1.1V. This was stable in Cinebench R20 all-core rendering and delivered a small improvement to our memory bandwidth numbers.

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