I was just reading through the Tom's Hardware review of the Ryzen 3600 and I can't see what you're talking about. The gaming performance is within 3% or so of the i5-9600K in basically every game. Granted, these tests were conducted at only 1920x1080, but still, if there were such a dramatic performance difference, it should be noticeable at lower resolutions too.

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-ryzen-5-3600-review...

Native gaming isn't particularly cpu-bound these days. I wish I could take the overall performance of a 3700 and divide it between four cores instead of eight. IPC is king when it comes to game console emulation.

That same review has an overclocked i5-9600K vs a stock one and the performance difference is pretty large. An i5-9600K @ 5.0 is almost as significant of an improvement over a stock one as a stock i5-9600K is over the lowest performing CPU of the bunch.

What percentage of 9600Ks can hit that OC and keep stable under load?

~90 %

Bulldozer series were that - 4,6,8 normal cores which could have been glued in pairs to make double wide cores (this also produced a metric ton of comments and articles how FX series "weren't really 8 (6,4) cores"). CPUs were good enough but apparently this architecture was hard to utilize fully (and had other issues, e.g. with IPC).

Memory latency is 20-50 % worse, but that doesn't mean 20-50 % lower FPS. What it does mean is in CPU limited scenarios Ryzen CPUs currently cannot touch Intel's CPUs. Even several year old high end Intel parts outperform Ryzens there, even if the Ryzen part in question has better single threaded throughput (i.e. Cinebench).

At the 3600 price point this is largely irrelevant though, since you will be GPU limited by way of budget anyway.

A 3600 may have much worse memory latency, but it's also got more than twice the cache of a 9900k. At least according to the linus tech tips review, the 3700x beats the 9900k in CSGO, a horrendously single-threaded, cpu limited game.

I don't think CSGO provides much insight, considering that its engine was already outdated for many years on release (2012) and has received few significant updates since. The 3rd party benchmark map that is typically used for these tests does not reflect actual gameplay well. You'll notice that in the benchmark the game is running quite smoothly, meanwhile in actual games CSGO has been plagued by horrid microstuttering and poor framepacing for years (largely caused by the ever-increasing amount of skins and swappable models).

Games like SOTTR provide much better insight into the performance characteristics of modern engines instead of 2004 tech, both in CPU and GPU limited scenarios (depending on settings).

You specifically said:

> What it does mean is in CPU limited scenarios Ryzen CPUs currently cannot touch Intel's CPUs.

CSGO, regardless of how old the engine is, is very much a CPU limited title, and not only do Ryzen CPUs "touch" Intel in CSGO, they beat it.

In SOTTR the 3600 is about on par with a 9600k: https://www.gamersnexus.net/hwreviews/3489-amd-ryzen-5-3600-...

This is true, I’d say the build GP describes would probably be good for someone who is short on cash and wants to build a machine that is OK/Good for gaming and Good for things like programming or photo/audio/video editing. It’s true that that build won’t knock anyone’s socks off and isn’t optimized for anything in particular, but the fact that you can make a build like that with such good parts at that price is a net positive for consumers.

Weird thing about benchmark is that Cinebench score is treated as most important metric. It's very informative score for CG rendering use cases but not for all use cases like gaming, video editing, etc. I suspect that vendors/benchmarkers use it because of Cinebench multithread is scales very well by increasing threads (so easier to advertise higher core count model).