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Is the AMD Ryzen 5 5600 still a smart CPU to buy in 2025?
Reece Bithrey answers the pertinent question of how good value the AMD Ryzen 5 5600 is in 2025. Take a look and see how well it performs.
We've seen the 5600 as low as £100 over the past few months, making it eminently affordable for new builds or upgrading existing Ryzen systems, but how does it hold up in performance terms five years later? To find out, I recently built a Ryzen 5 5600 system at home and ran it through a gauntlet of performance tests, including synthetic benchmarks and modern games. RAM32GB Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4-3200 CL163200MT/s CL16 RAM is the sweet spot for AM4 in terms of price-to-performance, and this 32GB Corsair kit is affordable and well-regarded.Main StorageCrucial P310 1TB NVMe SSDOne of Crucial's newer PCIe 4.0 SSDs with zippy reads and writes that makes for decent value.Secondary StorageWD SN5000 4TB NVMe SSDA drive for storing less frequently-accessed files and games in a big capacity that we quite like.CaseNZXT H5 Flow (2024) (Black)I wanted to try NZXT's latest H5 Flow, given its clean aesthetics, good airflow, and the popularity of the previous generation.MotherboardGigabyte B550 Aorus Elite AX V2A decently specced AM4 motherboard with solid I/O, on-board Wifi 6E and Bluetooth, and PCIe 4.0 support for GPU and the primary SSD.CoolerNoctua NH-U12SIt might be overkill for the 5600, but it remains a fantastic cooler that can push a serious amount of air while remaining quiet.FansNoctua NF-A14 PWM chromax,black.swap & Noctua NF-F12 PWM chromax.black.swap.These are high-performance, quiet case fans that can help a lot with airflow.PSUNZXT C850 Gold ATX 3.1 (Black)850W provides more than enough power for the current components inside, and provides headroom for later down the line with support for the latest generation of parts.Now, onto what makes this CPU such a canny choice, and the first performance testing.
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