The big AMD "Zen 3" architecture we've been hearing a lot about is finally here, and we have with us its most affordable part, the 6-core Ryzen 5 5600X. AMD claims that the 5600X is everything an AAA gamer would possibly want, and that the processor shouldn't get in the way of even premium 4K graphics cards.

AMD is debuting the Ryzen 5 5600X at a staggering $299, which is the highest launch price ever for a Ryzen 5-series processor, higher than what you'd pay for an 8-core 3700X. AMD states that the 5600X should have everything you need to build a gaming desktop for any resolution. Unlike the 5800X and 5900X which lack stock cooling solutions, AMD is including a cooler with the Ryzen 5. The chip has the same 95 W TDP as its predecessor, the 3600X, and is built on the same 7 nm silicon fabrication node.

The Ryzen 9 5900X is a 12-core/24-thread processor AMD is pricing at $549, about the same as the current Core i9-10900K street price (it originally launched at around $500). Ryzen 9 5900X's CPU cores are built on the same 7 nm silicon fabrication process as the Ryzen 3000 "Zen 2" processor, but with several refinements to the microarchitecture. The biggest change with "Zen 3" has to be the company doing away with the 4-core CCX and unifying all cores of the CPU chiplet into a single 8-core CCX. Even within the CPU core, AMD has worked to reduce latencies, improved branch-prediction, optimized the execution engine, fattened the front-end and load/store units, and deployed faster caches, which has a direct impact on IPC, or single-thread performance. IPC is the single biggest contributor to gaming performance, and the 19% claimed IPC gain over "Zen 2" should mean AMD has taken the gaming crown since the "Zen 2" architecture wasn't too far behind "Comet Lake" at gaming to begin with.

Unlike the competition, AMD isn't launching a new chipset with Zen 3. Existing motherboards based on AMD 500-series or 400-series chipsets will work with the new Ryzen 5000 Series processors after a BIOS update.