AMD’s Ryzen 5 2600 6 core CPU is on sale for £133 (£41 off)
Ahh here cometh the pay-day CPU deals. AMD’s Ryzen 5 2600 is currently available for an impressive £133. That’s almost 25% off its retail price, which is crazy when you think about just what you’re getting with this thing. Go back only two years, and a mainstream quad core eight thread processor would set you back near enough £400. Today, you can get two extra cores, four extra threads, a ton of extra cache, and relatively similar clock speeds for a fraction of that price and setup cost. And that is nice, all praise our Ryzen CPU overlords.
- Grab this deal today from amazon.co.uk for £133 (24% off)
One of the big criticisms of AMD’s Ryzen 5 2600 processor on launch was just how little difference there was between it and it’s Ryzen 5 2600X bigger brother. In fact, there was only about £20 difference between the two, and for the cash you got yourself a higher clock speed and better silicon, so why go with the lower part? Well with these kind of deals that gap widens massively and it certainly makes the Ryzen 5 2600 far more impressive than when it first launched this time last year.
Ryzen 5 2600 Use Cases
So why is it worth buying a Ryzen 5 2600? Well you can check out our full review here, however the big advantage for those moving to a CPU like this is what you can do on a productivity level. Those 12 threads found in the 2600 will definitely help when it comes to rendering applications, and multi-task workloads. If you’re into streaming, it’s an ideal part as leveraging those extra threads makes gaming and streaming on the same system far easier than if you were to do the same on a quad core. Take this thing to CineBench R15 and overclock it to a 4.2 GHz, and it’ll easily score the same as a stock Intel Core i7-8700K processor.
Aside from that, the Ryzen refresh with the second series included a number of improvements to the overall Zen architecture, AMD’s 14nm was refined to 12nm, and memory latency was improved leaps and bounds over its successor, improving in-game performance quite dramatically. There’s also the software side of things too. Paired with a strong cooling solution the 2600 will quite merrily auto-overclock itself to 4.0 GHz and beyond fairly easily, go tinkering in those BIOS options yourself, or in AMD’s Ryzen Master utility and it’s not too difficult to get this thing up to 4.2 GHz.
Specifications
| Base/Turbo Clock | 3.4 / 3.9 GHz |
| Socket | AM4 |
| Cores/Threads | 6/12 |
| Lithography | 12nm |
| Cache | 16MB |
| Memory Support | DDR4 2933 MHz |
| Memory Channels | 2 |
| Max PCIe Lanes | 16+4 |
| TDP | 65W |
| Cooler Included | AMD Wraith Stealth Cooler |
Could be better?
It’s not perfect of course. It does have its flaws, the Ryzen 5 2600’s single core performance is somewhat lacking compared to its Intel rivals. Although admittedly it performs about as well as a Intel Core i5-8400 anyway, and if you’re still on anything Skylake and prior, this thing’ll still run rings around it on that front so no worries there.
On top of that, AMD’s Ryzen architecture is typically very memory dependent. This is due to the interconnect fabric (infinity fabric) AMD uses actually operating at the same clock speed as you’re system memory. The Infinity Fabric connects each of the Ryzen 5 2600’s core complexes together (each of the four holding 1 to 2 cores each), meaning that for them to communicate as fast as possible, you’ll need to invest in a 3000 MHz+ memory kit. In game AMD still suffers a bit compared to Intel however on the whole you’re talking anywhere between 0 and 5% frame rate at most and it varies depending on the title as well.
Perfect Pairings
If it were us, we’d pair this with a nice B450 ITX motherboard, perhaps one of ASRock’s Fatal1ty B450 Gaming-ITX/AC mobos, 16GB of DDR4 running at 3200 MHz, and maybe an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 as well, just to get the most out of that 1080p resolution. In fact it’s fairly easy to couple this together with a 250GB M.2 and a 1TB Samsung 860 Evo and end up with an ITX system that’ll mash any productivity task you throw at it, any game at 1440p, and still come in at under £900.
Image Credits: Tom's Hardware / AMD
