R5-3600 adopts 7nm process, Zen2 architecture, 6-core 12 thread design, basic frequency is 3.6GHz, maximum acceleration frequency is 4.2GHz, L3 cache is 32MB, TDP 65W, AM4 interface, dual-channel DDR4 memory and PCI-E 4.0 are supported, and independent graphics card is needed without nuclear display.
If you upgrade from R5- 1600 to R5-3600, peripherals such as motherboard and memory don't need to be replaced, just upgrade the BIOS, so the upgrade cost is not high, so the focus is on performance improvement. From the IPC point of view, Zen2 architecture is improved by 18% compared with Zen architecture. Then considering the frequency difference between R5- 1600 and R5-3600, the single-core performance of R5-3600 is improved by about 35% (the frequency is about 17%+ 18% of IPC).
Single-core performance is improved by about 35%. As for the multi-core part, R5-3600 is ahead by 30% even in terms of fundamental frequency, according to the correlation difference of the whole core frequency and IPC difference. Therefore, in terms of CPU performance, R5-3600 leads obviously, and it should be more obvious to switch to R5-3600.
In addition, don't ignore that R5- 1600 is not as good as R5-3600 in supporting memory. After switching to R5-3600, the memory can run at a higher frequency and the performance can be further improved. And the L3 cache of R5-3600 will be doubled, which will obviously improve some games. As for PCI-E 4.0, there is no need to care.
In fact, we can refer to the improvement of AMD 8 core processors with different architectures. We can see that Zen2 architecture has improved by more than 40% in applications and games compared with Zen architecture products, and the impression will undoubtedly be stronger, and the subsequent product optimization will be better, so it will definitely be better after the change.
But I personally don't recommend this, because Zen3 has been out for so long now, and the improvement of Zen3 is not small compared with Zen2. Needless to say this. Considering the future, it is better to change to Zen3. Of course, the cost of changing Zen3 will be higher, because the motherboard needs to be changed, and R5-5600X is more expensive than R5-3600, but I personally think the price is still worth it.