AMD Ryzen 5 9600X Review

AMD are finally launching the "Zen 5"-based Ryzen 9000-series, but will the Ryzen 5 9600X prove to be the mid-range scrapper it’s billed as?

Product on Review: Ryzen 5 9600X
Manufacturer: AMD
MSRP:
– US: $279
– AUS: TBC
– UK: ~£265 inc.V.A.T.

Introduction

Summer 2024 has already been a season rife with controversy. AI is the watchword for investors but not necessarily consumers, leading to mixed fortunes for the sector as a whole. Intel is under the cosh due not only to failings in their past two Core i9 generations but also perceived lack of communication and transparency to their customers and the media. Pricing continues to be a concern for those seeking to upgrade to or invest in a new PC generation. An inauspicious time perhaps to be launching a new CPU.

After a minor delay to ensure a smooth launch AMD are now finally ready to take the wraps off the first two members of their new Ryzen 9000-series CPUs. The Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X immediately take two of four spots in the product stack and will be joined by the 9900X and 9950X in the very near future, filling out a CPU range that will be eventually paired with 800-series motherboards for a comprehensive refresh of AMD’s consumer lineup.

For the moment however all of the 9000-series CPUs will be supported by AMD’s well-established 600-series motherboard lineup. Pricing and featureset makes the B650E models an ideal companion for the 9600X while B650 designs are a more affordable option with patchy support for both PCIe Gen5 graphics/storage and fast USB. When buying, customers should ensure that any newly purchased motherboard has been updated to the latest BIOS (AEGSA 1.1.7.0 or later) or they have access to a 7000-series CPU/BIOS Flashback to update it themselves.

The Ryzen 5 9600X – the CPU we’re reviewing today – has the same 6-core/12-thread layout that formed the mainstay of Ryzen’s mainstream tiers, but will incorporate a new ‘Zen 5’ architecture under the hood that will bring IPC gains and higher power efficiency. The Ryzen 7 9700X meanwhile boasts 8 cores and 16 threads in addition to a frequency bump, potentially making it a better CPU both for productivity and gaming.

Both CPUs compare favourably with the 7000-series when it comes to launch pricing by taking nibbles out of their predecessor’s MSRP. The 9600X will be available for $279 or its regional equivalent and the 9700X a competitive $359; regional pricing is to be confirmed but we do not expect it to deviate greatly from a flat exchange rate conversion plus relevant VAT/sales tax.

Not only will these processors face a stern test from the now more affordable mainstream 7000-series and 7800X3D, they will also be confronted by Intel’s exceptional 13th and 14th Gen mid-tier processors. There will be a competitive SKU from each both in terms of price and performance already well entrenched, but power efficiency and upgrade paths will also serve as key differentiators in what’s sure to be a tough contest.

Speaking of upgrade paths, this processor is aimed squarely at owners of CPUs on the now-ageing AM4 platform who can’t or won’t take the intermediate step of transitioning to the 5800X3D. Intel 11th Gen and earlier platforms are also ripe for an upgrade, with the 9600X being the most affordable entry into the latest AMD platform.

So, with all that in mind, let’s take a closer look at the new processors from AMD.

Technical Specifications & Features

Model: Ryzen 5 9600X
Cores/Threads: 6/12
Max Boost: 5.4GHz
Base Clock: 3.9GHz
L2 Cache: 6MB (6 x 1MB)
L3 Cache: 32MB
Max Memory Speed (non-OC): DDR5-5600 (2 x 16GB)
TDP: 65W

Note: To support 9000-series processors a motherboard needs to be updated to AEGSA 1.1.7.0 or newer

Delidded Ryzen 9000-series CPU exposing two CCDs and one cIOD

AMD’s Ryzen 9000-series CPUs, codenamed “Granite Ridge”, are manufactured by TSMC in part utilising their latest 4nm 4NX process. Setting aside architectural improvements, a die shrink should allow the silicon to operate with lower voltages and at higher frequencies, meaningfully improving power efficiency at key performance bands. AMD has chosen to re-use the cIOD, manufactured using TSMC’s 6nm process, from the 7000-series rather than substantially revise its design ahead of new memory standards being released.

The Zen 5 architecture incorporates key improvements over Zen 4 while adhering to the same CCD + cIOD chiplet layout that has proved so successful since its debut in 2019’s 3000-series. Each 9000-series CPU can feature up-to 2 CCDs for compute and a single large IOD which houses functionality that benefits less from the cutting-edge process node. These include PCIe signalling, the memory controller, iGPU and other aspects of the SoC.

Ryzen 9000-series CPUs conform to the AM5 socket standard and are thus backwards compatible with AMD 600-series motherboards. AM5-compatible CPU coolers remain compatible with the new processors as there are no mechanical differences to be accounted for. TDP for each of the classes of processor has changed however, with both 9700X and 9600X slimmed down to a 65W TDP envelope from 105W. In theory, this should mean that a wider selection of CPU coolers will be able to cope with the cooling requirements of these ostensibly mid-range processors.

At-a-glance Ryzen 9000-series comparison

Internal AMD testing indicates that Zen 5 can boast a double-digit percentage IPC improvement over Zen 4 averaged across selected workloads, continuing Ryzen’s impressive track record of generational performance uplift. To achieve these IPC improvements Zen 5 incorporated a swathe of tweaks, changes and additions over Zen 4. Chiefly, AMD focussed on increasing data bandwidth and L1 per-core cache structures, but a complete list of changes touches on most aspects of the CPUs function.

Particular emphasis was placed on the AVX-512 datapath for this update, which was doubled to 512-bit, and more support for the bfloat16 floating point data structure, both of which enable greater acceleration of workloads aligned with machine learning. Conventional workloads will benefit from a more advanced Branch Predictor that performs two predictions per cycle, leveraging the larger L1 data cache and improved L2 bandwidth.

The launch 9000-series CPUs are all equipped with a nominal integrated 2 CU (128-shader) iGPU based on RDNA 2. They offer hardware audio and video encode/decode (including AV1 hardware decode) and display-out if supported by the motherboard, but these desktop processors are designed to be paired with a discrete GPU when gaming. Integrated graphics are however excellent troubleshooting features and in some cases can be leveraged to accelerate relevant workloads that might ordinally be offloaded to the dGPU.

The Granite Ridge SoC also has the following features as standard:

128b DDR5 5600 MT/s memory controller
28 PCIe Gen5 lanes (4 reserved to the high-speed link to the chipset)
5 USB Ports
– 3 USB 3.2 Gen2x2 Type-C
– 1 USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-A
– 1 USB 2
4 Simultaneous display streams when using the integrated GPU

Additional I/O functionality in the form of ancillary PCIe lanes, peripheral expansion and storage (SATA and M.2) is offered by the motherboard chipset with configuration determined by the vendor.

800-series chipset overview. Motherboards will be available later this summer or early autumn

Overclocking

Overclocking as a test is beyond the scope of this review but we would be remiss to not mention that the old Curve Optimiser tool which allowed Ryzen 7000-series users to undervolt the CPU in a manner that was PMFW/PBO aware has been joined by a new tool. The ‘Curve Shaper’ tool can assign voltage margins in up-to 15 different frequency-temperature bands, allowing for finer control for voltage adjustment in bands that are stable and unstable. Curve Shaper tables apply across all cores, and can also be shifted as a group by Curve Optimiser.

Test Setup & Testing

For the purpose of testing the Ryzen 5 9600X we used GIGABYTE’s X670E AORUS MASTER as it placed highly in our motherboard assessments and should help unlock the true potential of this chip. The motherboard UEFI BIOS was updated to provide support for the new processor generation.

CPU being tested

AMD Ryzen 5 9600X

TEST SETUP

Cooling CORSAIR H150i ELITE LCD
Motherboard X670E AORUS MASTER
Memory 64GB CORSAIR Dominator Platinum RGB 5200MHz DDR5
Graphics ZOTAC RTX 3070 Ti HOLO Extreme
Storage CORSAIR Force LX 512GB SSD
PSU Corsair RM 1000 80 Plus Gold Certified PSU
Monitor AOC U2879VF

BENCHMARKS

Cinebench R23 – Single/Multi-core CPU Rendering
x264 HD 4.0 – 1st and 2nd pass encoding
SiSoftware SANDRA – CPU & Memory benchmarks
POV-RAY – CPU Ray Tracing
TrueCrypt – CPU Encryption Read/Write
AIDA64 – CPU benchmarks & Memory
PCMARK 10 – CPU Productivity
Davinci Resolve – Puget Benchmark
Blender – Classroom Benchmark
Games – Assassin’s Creed Odyssey & Total War: WARHAMMER II

OTHER SOFTWARE

Temperature Analysis: CoreTemp
Stress Testing Software: AIDA64 Stability Test
CPU Specification Monitoring: CPU-Z

Temperatures

Below are the temperatures for each of the CPUs – without any overclock applied. We’ve also compared to previously released AMD and Intel counterparts (which we’ve also benchmarked against on the subsequent pages too):

The Ryzen 5 9600X remains a toasty chip, in part due to the thickness IHS which was also an issue for the 7000-series. True enthusiasts comfortable with delidding the chip and lapping the heatspreader will be eager to start modding the chip, but this result is perfectly fine for a processor in the socket-AM5 platform.

Power Consumption

It’s interesting to note the power consumption across all processors. Although they are using a combination of different motherboard chipsets, energy results can fluctuate between manufacturers due to the features and specifications that are integrated. First of all, for the idle tests the system is cold booted into Windows and no additional applications are executed – the watts are noted on the external energy monitor we use and then the system is loaded with 3DMark FireStrike – watts are again monitored for the duration of the test and the highest rated wattage result is then noted down. Below are the results of this energy test.

While nothing can seemingly beat he efficiency of the 7800X3D, the 9600X is nonetheless one of the least power-hungry tested.

Ray Tracing Performance – POV-Ray 3.7

Persistence of Vision Raytracer’s PovRay is a free and open source 3D animator application with versions for computers with different operating systems.

This product allows users to build their custom 3D worlds with excellent quality despite their computer’s hardware. It has adjustable options for levels of radiance, refraction, and reflection. Calculation time may vary depending on the computer model, but PovRay can adapt to many computer builds, and is supported by the open source community.

AES Encryption Performance – TrueCrypt 7.1a

TrueCrypt is a discontinued source-available freeware utility used for on-the-fly encryption (OTFE). It can create a virtual encrypted disk within a file or encrypt a partition or (under Microsoft Windows except Windows 8 with GPT) the entire storage device (pre-boot authentication).

Encoding Performance – X264 HD

Simply put, this test measures how fast your machine can encode a short, DVD quality MPEG-2 video clip into a high-quality x264 video clip. What’s x264, you ask? It’s more or less the next-generation Xvid/DivX codec. I think it’s ideal for a benchmark because the application (x264.exe) reports fairly accurate compression results (in frames per second) for each pass of the video encoding process, and it uses multi-core processors very efficiently.

x264 HD gives results for 2 passes when compressing an MPEG-2 clip into x264. It presents 4 separate results for each pass giving a total of 8 – all results are given in FPS. For each pass I have averaged out the results.

Processing Features Performance – AIDA64

AIDA64 Product Page

This simple integer benchmark focuses on the branch prediction capabilities and the misprediction penalties of the CPU. It finds the solutions for the classic “Queens problem” on a 10 by 10 sized chessboard. At the same clock speed theoretically the processor with the shorter pipeline and smaller misprediction penalties will attain higher benchmark scores. For example — with HyperThreading disabled — the Intel Northwood core processors get higher scores than the Intel Prescott core based ones due to the 20-step vs 31-step long pipeline. CPU Queen test uses integer MMX, SSE2 and SSSE3 optimizations.

We should note the lower than expected ‘CPU Queen’ result for the 9600X. This may be due to depreciation of the benchmark leading to it not being updated for the 9000-series.

Memory Transfer Performance – AIDA64

AIDA64 Product Page

Processing Power Performance – Cinebench R23

CINEBENCH can measure systems with up to 64 processor threads. This test scene contains approximately 2,000 objects which in turn contain more than 300,000 polygons in total, and uses sharp and blurred reflections, area lights, shadows, procedural shaders, antialiasing, and much more. The result is displayed in points (pts). The higher the number, the faster your processor.

Bandwidth Performance – SiSoftware SANDRA

SiSoftware Product Page

SANDRA isn’t always a benchmark that is included in hardware reviews but I believe it shouldn’t be ignored. SANDRA provides a vigorous package that tests your system in a rather large array of benchmarks. There are many aspects of benchmark that can be executed. We will be considering – CPU and memory tests.

Overall System Performance – PCMark 10

PCMark 10 Product Page

Developed in partnership with Benchmark Development Program members Acer, AMD, Condusiv Technologies, Dell, HGST, HP, Intel, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Samsung, SanDisk, Seagate and Western Digital, PCMark 10 is the latest version in FutureMark’s popular series of PC benchmarking tools. Improving on previous releases, PCMark 10 includes new tests using popular applications from Adobe and Microsoft.

4K Editing Performance – DaVinci Resolve PugetBench

DaVinci Resolve is not only an industry-standard coloring tool, but also includes features for video editing, VFX, and more. While we also have benchmarks for Premiere Pro, After Effects, and other creative applications, every application will utilize the hardware in a computer in very different and unique ways which can make it extremely difficult to determine exactly what hardware will give the end user the best possible performance.

Rendering Performance – Blender

Blender is a free and open-source 3D computer graphics software toolset used for creating animated films, visual effects, art, 3D printed models, motion graphics, interactive 3D applications, virtual reality, and computer games. Blender’s features include 3D modeling, UV unwrapping, texturing, raster graphics editing, rigging and skinning, fluid and smoke simulation, particle simulation, soft body simulation, sculpting, animating, match moving, rendering, motion graphics, video editing, and compositing.

Please note: Blender has recently been updated and the metric for results has changed with the new update, rendering our historical benchmarks void – hence why we have less results for this benchmark, taking on the new samples per minute metric.

Gaming Performance – AC: Odyssey & Total War: WARHAMMER II

It’s important for us to perform a number of game benchmarks as well as the synthetic tests because gamers will want to know if there are any significant benefits. So here we have two recent gaming titles benchmarked with the RTX 3070 Ti. Both gaming titles are CPU-intensive – AC Odyssey is the last AC title in the series to be CPU-bound. Valhalla uses DX12 API.

Conclusion

AMD’s Ryzen 5 9600X enters the market in a position more challenging than it might appear at first glance. At launch it will be the lowest tier of 9000-series processors but still priced as a mid-tier ($250-300) component, comfortably higher than the 7600X ($180) which it replaces and on par with the 7700X ($290) that boasts two more cores. Thank goodness therefore that the new Zen 5 architecture brings with it meaningful architectural improvements, even if this SKU can’t quite bring all the potential operating frequency benefits to bear.

So it’s in this respect that it suffers somewhat from the great strength of the AM5 platform: backwards compatibility. It’s the same ‘issue’ that AM4 had; and by issue we mean it’s more of a headache for AMD than the consumers who will be able to enjoy much greater choice when adopting the new platform.

One on-going reservation we have with AM5 in particular is the IHS thickness and its impact on reported CPU temperatures. It makes the 9600X, and 7000-series before it, appear to handle temperatures more poorly than they do. There’s no substantial fix for this aside from warranty-breaking modifications but it does make us wonder whether AMD have anything planned for future releases on this socket to ameliorate this niggling issue.

Fundamentally the 9600X is a good replacement for the 7600X that will serve platform adopters well if they would benefit from the IPC improvements. The single thread performance benefits are significant and in many workloads will be tangible, which in fairness is not a conclusion we’ve always come to for new mid-range processors. Out-and-out gamers however may prefer to opt for a 7800X3D, which can dip as low as $320 and is often available for $340. Those opting for a 9600X and waiting for the 9000X3D chips will be able to benefit from great performance today and a worthy slot-in upgrade as and when the new chip becomes available.

System Integrators and OEMs meanwhile will approve of the new chip as it becomes a fixture of systems deep into 2025. Expect it in plenty of pre-built gaming PCs coming your way this back-to-school period.

Bear in mind also that the AM5 platform will be supported until at least 2027, and with that sort of longevity you have to have a very compelling reason to lurch to the opposition. Which brings us to the elephant in the room.

Intel’s mid-tier 13th and 14th generation CPUs, specifically the i5-13600k and 14600K, have always been very impressive chips with excellent out-the-box performance for gaming and productivity. In a vacuum we might even recommend them over AMD’s 9600X, particularly for scenarios that can take full advantage of their P-Core + E-Core architectural advantages over the raw single-threaded performance of AMD chip. There are however two very significant downsides to their adoption right now.

The first is that LGA1700 is essentially EOL. Arrow Lake will utilise a new socket and motherboard chipset, leaving no long-term upgrade path for those who adopt the platform in 2024. Second and far more worrying however is the instability issue plaguing 13th and 14th Gen. Core i9 processors.

Intel’s ongoing lack of transparency over the problem (which increasingly appears to have a manufacturing defect as the root cause), how far down the processor range it goes, and spotty adherence to even revised RMA practices make it impossible to confidently recommend any processor from that range.

While we’ve tested with an X670E motherboard there remains a comprehensive array of 600-series designs available today to suit requirements. The 800-series updates are subtle and make a lot of sense both in terms of their naming scheme and respective feature-sets, but they’re expected to be released for a couple of months yet.

600-series motherboards need to be updated to AEGSA 1.1.7.0 or newer to support Ryzen 9000-series CPUs. Check with your retailer to ensure UEFI BIOS updates are made before shipment otherwise you risk it being an expensive paperweight that lacks compatibility.

AMD’s Ryzen 5 9600X achieves our Approved award as the current mid-range processor of choice for gaming and light productivity workloads, even if some caveats remain over its pricing in a crowd of very competitive AM5 processors.

AMDs well-established tier of 6-core processors continues to be a compelling option for those adopting a new platform and seeking the best bang for their buck. Stern competition already exists in the form of both the cheaper 7600X and higher core-count 7700X, but the 9600X could be the sweet spot for gaming performance today with future upgrade paths in the very near future. As Intel’s woes mount, this will be the go-to SKU for legions of new platform adopters well into 2025.

Pros
+ Good gaming results
+ Better than average mix workload result
+ Very good power efficiency
+ Great single-threaded performance
+ Long-term support for the AM5 platform
+ Bridges the gap part-way to 7800X3D performance in games

Cons
– Expensive for an entry-point into the Ryzen 9000-series
– Squeezed by 7600X and 7700X
– 7800X3D still a compelling alternative

Click here for an explanation of our awards at Vortez.net.

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