Why it matters: An early review of AMD's Ryzen 5 3600 has leaked and shows the processor outperforming Ryzen 7 2700X in several benchmarks and lagging only slightly behind Intel's ninth-generation Core i9 in productivity workloads. Official reviews (including TechSpot's) are coming next month.

Spain-based tech reviews site El Chapuzas Informatico put the newest AMD CPU to the test against the Ryzen 7 and an Intel Core i9-9900K and found it running between the two and even beating both in some cases. This seems to confirm a previous leak we reported on at the beginning of the month.

The Ryzen 5 3600 was set up on a Gigabyte Aorus Gaming 7 WiFi motherboard with G.Skill FlareX DDR4@3200 MHz, and a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition GPU. In Cinebench R15 and R20 runs, the Ryzen 5 3600 beat the Zen+ based 2700X in single-core performance. It did not fair as well for multi-core, but that is no surprise considering it is 6-core/12-thread versus 8C/16T.

Even with a higher memory latency of 80.5ns, the Ryzen 5's performance was not hampered to a significant degree. For example, in wPrime 2.10 32M the 3600 almost kept pace with the Core i9-9900K falling only slightly behind. It was faster than previous generation CPUs including Intel Core i7-8700K, 8600K, and AMD Ryzen 7 2700X and 1700X. In the multi-core wPrime tests, the Ryzen 7 2700X slightly outperformed its next-gen counterpart.

It was noted that the Ryzen 5's memory write speed was unusually low. It only hit 25.6GB/s, while the 2700X and 1700X were over 47GB/s. "However this could be due to the motherboard being used or maybe an issue with sub timings on the memory, something that will need to be verified in future reviews," TechPowerUp speculates.

All in all, AMD's Ryzen 5 3600 could not keep up with the ninth-generation Intel Core processor, but it didn't lag far behind. As gains against previous AMD offerings, the 3600 showed it is a step up, for the most part, especially considering its lower clock speed and fewer cores/threads.

For an MSRP of $200, the Ryzen 5 3600 should make a decent choice for mid-range gaming rigs, especially if it overclocks well. El Chapuzas Informático has some gaming benchmarks for Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Far Cry 5, Final Fantasy XV, and Total War: Warhammer 2 if you're interested in those. The 3600 ran right behind the i9 in all of those.

As with all unofficial news, hold off your excitement until something more concrete comes out. AMD's Ryzen 5 3600 drops on July 7, and you can bet we'll have our full review ready in due time.

All benchmarks graphs by El Chapuzas Informatico