Ryzen 5 3600 performs well at idle temperatures and delivers strong gaming results.
Ryzen 5 3600 performs well at idle temperatures and delivers strong gaming results.
At 3800x it remains consistent. In balance power mode the CPU stays idle at about 1.4 volts with average temperatures around 45°C. The cooler Noctua DH-15 helps maintain this. When switching to power-saving mode, voltages drop to roughly 0.9 and temperatures fall to about 35°C during idle.
At first I shared this information and some doubted me. The room temperature was high everywhere and not low enough. They suggested using multiple temperature monitors to prevent idle CPU usage. If you run ICue, Ryzen Master, or hwinfo, the CPU will perceive load and adjust voltage, boosting speed and temperatures. The cooler that came with the 3600 model performed poorly. I’m unsure about other stock coolers, but my 3600 cooler was bad—even after applying new thermal paste, I thought the original paste was fine. Airflow and ambient temperature mattered too. My home is around 70°F in a unique layout with five Corsair ML120 fans and a Strix 3 fan RX 2060. It stayed hot despite the setup, so airflow and environment played a role. I invested $160 in fans inside a mesh front panel case with a Strix card. Early struggles with the new hardware. Still very satisfied with the performance boost from moving from the first to third generation Ryzen. With the H100i, I rarely exceed 60°C during long gaming sessions, while the stock cooler kept me around 80°C and throttled speed to 4GHz sometimes. It’s not ideal using a different cooler, but I’m managing and happy with the results after the swap.
I finally got into BIOS after about fifty attempts, but I'm stuck now. It looks like the MSDI is handling the updates, but my system won't boot again. I think they're pushing a BIOS update for their own BIOS, though. My machine was running at roughly 30°C with the stock cooler, so I'd recommend checking and possibly replacing the thermal paste.
I've observed with my 3600 on an NH-D15S that certain monitoring tools seem to treat the CPU as a workload, triggering boosts and resulting in elevated idle temps. Switching from HWINFO to Ryzen Master improved things, bringing temperatures down from 40-50°C to 28-35°C, with occasional spikes up to 45°C when background tasks ran. With a fairly relaxed fan setting (CPU and case fans capped at 60%), I’m seeing 60-70°C during gaming and reaching 75°C max in realbench stress tests. If you're facing heat issues, consider lowering PPT by about 10-15W (the default is 88W). This cut the temperature by roughly 10°C and only caused a 100MHz speed bump. Reducing PPT tends to work better than undervolting and is simpler overall. You can easily hit 3.6 GHz at PPTs around 44-50W. TL;DR – Cut PPT by around 10W to manage CPU temps – Stick to CPU-Z + Ryzen Master for monitoring – Other apps are seen as extra load – Your stock cooler isn’t great (it’s just the Wraith Stealth, not the Spire), and even the 8700 struggled with the original cooler’s boosting performance.
I strongly think this could be due to early adapter problems; the stock cooler doesn’t seem to be the main concern here. Of course, if you aim for serious overclocking, a better cooler would help, but the Ryzen series coolers appear quite solid for their price. It just brings back memories of the initial Ryzen releases when high temperatures were frequently mentioned on specific setups. BIOS and chipset updates have since addressed those issues.
Which board are you working with? I'm using the MSI B450 Pro Carbon AC, and it's booting up properly. The main issues are the voltage spikes and temperature readings. My BIOS is GSE Lite. Where can I check the CPU temperature there?
Adjusted the fan settings a bit, which really improved things. It seems the way these CPUs operate is quite different from what I'm used to. Before this model, my i7 5820k only got noticeably hot under heavy use, and the temperature rise was slow. Now the new AMD chips seem to spike up by about 20°C whenever they try anything.
For everyone: Open Task Manager in Windows and keep it running quietly in the background—make sure the Users tab is active. Then review temperatures and voltage from the wall PSU. I’m using a stock cooler, standard settings, and even an LLC configuration on my ASUS Prime B450-Plus with a Ryzen 2600X; the case has no fans, but it’s a custom build.