It's taken a while to get here—and it's honestly been a pretty bumpy road, too—but I'm pleased to present our review of the AMD Ryzen 5 9600X, the lowest-tier CPU currently on offer in AMD's Ryzen 9000 series family of Zen 5 processors. I'm not talking about the rocky situation where AMD recalled all stocks of the new Ryzen chips weeks before they were due to be sold, either—no, this is all about jumping around motherboards, updating firmware, and endlessly fiddling about with settings. All for what is actually a somewhat underwhelming new six-core CPU.
Anyway, let's just get down to specs business. The Ryzen 5 9600X is essentially a refreshed Ryzen 5 7600X, as it doesn't have any more cores or threads, there's no extra L3 cache, and even the boost clocks are barely any different. The only specs that are notably disparate are the base clocks (3.9 vs 4.7 GHz) and the TDPs (65 vs 105 W).
