The Ryzen 5 3600 is the best budget gaming CPU you can get right now. Ryzen 5000 CPUs are quite pricier, although they feature much better gaming performance. On the other hand, the 3600 is still great for games, even high-end gaming, and pretty solid for productivity tasks. The R5 3600 doesn’t require an expensive motherboard to work to its limits. Any quality board will do just fine. If you want to find out more about motherboards, do visit our motherboards section. It features articles that answer many motherboard-related questions.
The CPU is rated at 65 W TDP. This means you don’t have to worry about top-of-the-line VRM (voltage regulating module) or a bunch of extra features when buying a board to couple with the Ryzen 5 3600. But that doesn’t mean getting the first board on the search queue. There are plenty of quality boards out there that don’t cost a fortune. Today, we found the best motherboard for Ryzen 5 3600 you can get right now. You have budget choices, but we also included a couple of sorta high-end choices.
What we didn’t do, was including ultra-expensive X570 boards. If you want an expensive X570 board to couple with the Ryzen 5 3600, then you should check our list of the best X570 motherboards. If you want a B550 motherboard, visit our guide for the best B550 motherboards. Finally, here’s a list of the best air coolers for Ryzen CPUs.
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Picking the right motherboard
The main new technology offered on X570 boards is PCIe 4.0. The thing is, you don’t need it right now. SSDs utilizing PCIe don’t have an advantage over regular PCIe 3.0 and SATA SSDs. Next, even the most powerful video card at the moment, the RTX 2080 Ti, doesn’t utilize PCIe 3.0 bandwidth to its limit. And games certainly won’t run faster if you have PCIe 4.0 support.
On the other hand, PCIe 4.0 might come in handy in the future. While RTX 3xxx and Radeon Navi 20 cards should pack much more power than the current offerings, they shouldn’t be limited with PCIe 3.0. But cards showing up in 2021 and later could utilize the extra bandwidth that comes with PCIe 4.0.
Also, while current SSDs don’t benefit from PCIe 4.0, future models might. After all, both Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 utilize high-speed SSDs so PC gaming could also benefit from extra speed. But, again, that won’t happen until 2021.
Most B450 and X470 boards don’t support 3rd gen Ryzen CPUs out of the box. You need to update their BIOS before being able to use 3rd gen processors. And to update BIOS, you have to hook the board with the 1st or 2nd gen Ryzen CPU and start the system.
Some models support USB BIOS Flashback, allowing users to update BIOS without the CPU. But, in most cases, that’s not an option. So, if you decide to get a B450 or X470 board, ask the seller to update the board BIOS for you. Don’t forget that.
If you need a basic board there are a couple of great choices out there. They’re affordable but don’t provide a bunch of features. Also, if you pick a basic board you’ll be left with limited upgrade options.
You’ll be able to replace your Ryzen 5 3600 with an 8-core CPU, but that’s it. On the other hand, for just a couple of dozen bucks more, you have some great choices that can support even 12 core CPUs.
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