When comparing Ryzen 5 1600 vs Intel i5-6500, the Slant community recommends Ryzen 5 1600 for most people. In the question“What is the best processor to pair with the GTX 1060?” Ryzen 5 1600 is ranked 1st while Intel i5-6500 is ranked 3rd. The most important reason people chose Ryzen 5 1600 is:
This CPU is good for gaming, multitasking and compute-intensive applications like audio rendering and virtual machines.
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Pros
Pro Great for both gaming PCs and workstations
This CPU is good for gaming, multitasking and compute-intensive applications like audio rendering and virtual machines.
Pro Excellent stock cooler
This CPU comes with the Wraith Spire (non-RGB) cooler, which has the same cooling capacity as an after-market cooler worth around $40.
Pro Low power consumption
This CPU draws around 30W less than comparable CPUs at 65W.
Cons
Con Lower single-core performance
Older games and other applications which have not been optimized for threaded architectures may perform worse compared to Intel CPUs. As software developers update software and produce new software this should become less of a problem.