Rejoice, PC builders! The AMD Ryzen 5000 series of desktop CPUs are seeing massive price cuts. Given these span several retailers and a wide range of chips, this is likely a permanent price drop, rather than a one off sale, which is even better news for everyone's wallets.
Spotted by WCCFTech, AMD's Ryzen CPUs have dropped in price at Microcenter, Newegg, Amazon, and BestBuy. Prices have gone down by a significant amount too, between $60 USD and $170 chip depending. So far this seems to be true for the United States and the UK, so hopefully we'll see this discount spread further across the globe with a little time.
So far Amazon and BestBuy appear to have some of the best deals for the highest end chips. The top-of-the-line Ryzen 9 5950X is going for $600 or around £530 GBP, which is at least 25% off its previous MSRP. These are a great all round performance chip, with excellent power efficiency. In fact, one of our main complaints is that these were a bit pricy for what you're getting. At this new price point they're a banger of a deal, putting it slightly cheaper than Intel's comparable i9 12900k, which has fewer cores and threads.
But the same could be said for the somewhat cheaper Ryzen 9 5900X. Now priced at $450 at all of the mentioned retailers, this is a seriously good deal for our favourite AMD gaming chip. Again, our main complaint against this chip at launch was the price. Otherwise it's a great performance CPU with more threads than you'd ever want. At $450 USD, it's an easy one to recommend for people looking to build a great new powerful and somewhat budget conscious PC.
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The truly budget conscious are looked after here too. CPUs like the Ryzen 7 5800X were sitting at around $450 but are now as cheap as $300 at Microcenter. Others have them closer to $350 which we still think is a pretty good deal.
You can get even cheaper again if you're willing to drop to a Ryzen 5 5600X which both Microcenter and BestBuy currently have for $230. This is far cheaper than we've ever seen these units, and we've had them earmarked as a pretty good deal for a while now. The Ryzen 5 5600X is listed as one of our favourite affordable CPUs for gaming, and given these price drops the case for that is only stronger now.
Again, due to the breadth of retailers displaying the discounts, it's very likely this price drop comes from AMD. This means we're likely to see it spread to other retailers, and hopefully other regions fairly quickly. If there's supply to match the prices, it seems like a lot of nifty AMD powered rigs are about to join new households.
