PassMark has given us our first look at AMD Ryzen 5 9600, with benchmark results showing performance just a smidge behind its 9600X counterpart. Thanks to its reduced price, the CPU makes for a great entry to the AM5 platform while offering enough horsepower to run anything you throw at it.
According to these PassMark tests, Ryzen 5 9600 was able to deliver 4,433 single-core and 29,369 multi-core points, putting it respectively 3.2% and 2.2% behind Ryzen 5 9600X. It’s not necessarily a surprising result, considering that the main difference between the two resides only in a base and boost clock reduced by 100MHz and 200MHz respectively. This gap is smaller than the one separating last-gen’s Ryzen 7600X and 7600, with a respective 5.6% and 4.9% distance depending on the test.
Other than that, both Ryzen 5 9600 and 9600X have identical specs, packing six Zen 5 cores and 12 threads sharing 32MB of L3 cache. The tiny 2CU iGPU is also present, as well as PCIe 5.0 support. Both models are rated for 65W TDP, but the X variant will likely take more in its default non-ECO state.
When it comes to generational improvements, Ryzen 5 9600 marks an 11.8% single-core and 7.9% multi-core improvement against Ryzen 5 7600, which is a nice bump assuming real-world tasks see similar boosts. That said, Ryzen 5 9600 will bring the most value to budget users waiting to upgrade from an AM4 platform, in which case it brings a 28% uplift compared to the beloved Ryzen 5 5600.
Furthermore, since Ryzen 9600 also supports overclocking on B850 and higher chipsets, you can probably surpass 9600X’s out-of-the-box performance just by enabling PBO (Precision Boost Overdrive).
You can nab an AMD Ryzen 5 9600 for £219.98 at Scan in the UK, providing a £20 discount over its X counterpart. And with B850 and A620 motherboards starting at £164.99 and £74.99 respectively, entering the AM5 platform is no longer expensive. Better yet, you would have many upgrade paths including fan favourite X3D chips, plus the upcoming Zen 6 processors.
