AMD Ryzen 5 3600 vs. AMD Ryzen 7 3700X - Benchmark and Specs (cpu-monkey.com)
There's a comparison between your 3600 and a 3700X. Yours will never come close to the 3700X. You numbers aren't that bad. They're actually decent for a 3600 with your hardware. You're running 1 x 8GB stick of RAM and a baseline GPU, that will affect the score. **Edit: Put 2 x 8GB 3600Mhz with CL16 RAM in and retest too. 3200Mhz is barely working the FCLK**
You might have back round apps or things to turn off like right click "This PC" , "Properties" and go to "Advanced System Settings", select "Performance". Visual appearance is probably set to "Let Windows adjust what's best for my PC", change that to "What's best for performance" and close the window. Go into "Settings", "Apps" and turn off all the back round apps but Windows Security. Turn off "Game Mode" . Try testing again.
Bottom line is it defective or poor performance, no. Is the voltage too high, no. If you manually set it to have a constant Vcore of 1.45v, it will wear out the CPU. An all core OC has no benefit and it costs you in single threaded apps and benchmarks.
You're at the proverbial wall of what that CPU can do. Increasing RAM to 16GB at 3600Mhz, a better GPU, moving up to an X470-570 chipset would all help that score a little bit.
Comparing your CPU to another that is slightly faster stock can mean all the things I just said. They turn off a lot of stuff, have at least 16GB RAM (most likely with custom timings), a better GPU and a better chipset. They could be disabling cores for the single core test to boost numbers there. There's "tricks" but it's not reality in most cases.
"Real World" experience is what matters. Does it game ok? That one's tough because of your card, but the games it can run. Does it do the everyday tasks you want it to do? If you wanted serious performance, that was the wrong CPU, system to build. In any case, the bench numbers you provided are well within spec. Running Cinebench 23, 20, or 15 isn't going to prove the max boost you ever get to. To see that, try running HWiNFO and just watch the CPU clocks at idle. If you're seeing it hit 4.1-4.2 you really doing well. 3.9 would be acceptable for a 3600 non-X.
Is the marketing a "gimmick", you bet. The fine print tells it all. The maximum boost rated may not be exactly what each CPU is capable of. It's a guideline and not saying I agree with that approach. Any AMD official rep would tell you that CPU is within acceptable specs all the way down to a max boost of 3.8Ghz. You're beyond that. Now you "gained some performance", so it's the best it gets. I explained why others show better numbers, some cheat, some have better silicon and hardware.
"It worked before you broke it!"
