Bargain hunter Yes, we're all excited for Zen 3, but the upcoming arrival of AMD's third-gen architecture also means its current crop of Zen 2 processors are seeing price drops. The latest of these is the Ryzen 5 3600, which we called the best all-round value CPU last year.
Amazon is currently selling the chip at the bargain price of $159.98. That's around 20 percent off the MSRP of $199.
We love the Ryzen 5 3600; the 6-core/12-thread processors scored a perfect 100 in our review. It clocks between 3.6 GHz and 4.2 GHz, features a 32MB L3 cache, a 65-watt TDP, and comes with a Wraith Stealth cooler in the box.
The Ryzen 5 3600 offered fantastic value at launch and is an even better buy following the price drop. Stick it into a X570 or B550 motherboard, and you'll have all the benefits of PCIe 4.0, which means the money you save on a CPU could go (a little way) toward the $750 4TB Sabrant PCIe 4.0 SSD, which offers sequential read speeds of up to 4,900 MB/s and write speeds of up to 3,500 MB/s.
AMD's executive vice president of Computing and Graphics, Rick Bergman, recently confirmed that the consumer Zen 3 processors---not just the Epyc Milan enterprise chips---will arrive in 2020. As such, the company is dropping the prices of some current products and offering incentives to buy, such as the 'Equipped to Win' promotion that gives purchasers of high-end Ryzen 3000 CPUs (and Ryzen-powered PCs) a free copy of Assassin's Creed Valhalla when released.