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The Ryzen 5 7600X3D is excellent if you want to build a gaming PC on a budget. Its roughly $250 online price is already attractive, and if you’re able to pick it up for $200 (and potentially even less with a motherboard combo)at a Micro Center store, you’re making out like a bandit. Compare it to anything that isn’t packing 3D V-Cache, and the Ryzen 5 7600X3D runs away with gaming performance.
The closest competitor is Intel’s Core Ultra 5 250K Plus, as you can find it for around $220, and it’s only marginally slower than the Ryzen 7 9700X that will run you around $300. Above the Ryzen 5 7600X3D, the next logical step is the eight-core Ryzen 7 7800X3D, though with a premium of between $100 and $150, it’s in a different category for pricing. The good news for the Ryzen 5 7600X3D is that its six-core array doesn’t appear to be a major limiting factor in games.
There are some titles, notably Starfield, that see a boost when moving from six cores to eight. However, the extra cache pulls its weight for the Ryzen 5 7600X3D, so the hit isn’t as significant as what we see with a chip like the base Ryzen 5 7600X.
AMD went all-out on budget gaming at the cost of application performance. A few months ago, the application performance wouldn’t have been a big deal. AMD is able to keep pace with the Core i5-14400, and it’s about 17% behind the Core Ultra 5 225 in multithreaded performance despite packing fewer cores. In its price bracket, the Ryzen 5 7600X3D was slower but still acceptable given its gaming prowess.
That was before we had the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus, which is more than twice as fast in multithreaded performance and nearly 28% faster in our single-threaded rankings. It’s a better choice if you want gaming and productivity performance in equal strides. The Ryzen 5 7600X3D is faster in games, but not nearly on the same level as how much faster the Core Ultra 5 250K Plus is in applications.
This one is for the gamers, and gamers alone. On that front, the Ryzen 5 7600X3D is an excellent CPU, and even manages to take a jewel out of the Ryzen 7 7800X3D’s crown given its bargain bin pricing. For raw gaming performance, there isn’t a better value on the market right now.
- MORE: Best CPU for gaming
- MORE: CPU Benchmark Hierarchy
- MORE: Intel vs AMD
- MORE: How to Overclock a CPU
