The AMD Ryzen 5 5600X is now $270 in the US, a historic low
The 5600X is now cheaper (and faster) than the Core i5 11400F.
Good news, everyone! The Ryzen 5 5600X continues its march to lower prices, with the CPU now available from antonline via Ebay for $269.99. That's $10 cheaper than it was just last month and, critically, about the same price as the Intel Core i5 11400F. The Intel CPU debuted at a much lower price, but low supplies and positive reviews have inflated the price substantially, to the point where the more powerful 5600X is now the better value pick!
We won't rehash the entire article we wrote when the 5600X first started slippin', nor Katharine's excellent 5600X review which you should read, but here's the short version.
The reason the 5600X is so popular is that it combines a six-core, twelve-thread design with seriously fast individual cores. Six cores is about the minimum for a reasonably future-proof system, as games have started to become much better equipped to take advantage of high core count systems. Meanwhile, the big innovation of Ryzen 5000 was increasing single-core speeds by around 20% over Ryzen 3000, which was itself significantly faster than the first two Ryzen generations.
All things considered, AMD is now on-par or even better than Intel when it comes to gaming performance, something that hasn't been true for as long as I can remember - and that's a big reason to go Team Red when it comes to building a new PC.
Another reason is that even older 400-series motherboards can be upgraded to support these new chips - just confirm there's a BIOS update available if you're taking this route. AMD also has the lead when it comes to efficiency, with their CPUs tending to consume less power and therefore kick off less heat than their Intel competition, especially at the upper end of the market. They also tend to do pretty darn well in multi-threaded scenarios, like video transcoding or 3D rendering. The 5600X in particular also comes with a CPU cooler that's actually pretty decent, if a tad loud. So - plenty of reasons to go with AMD for your CPU, and getting a 5600X for $270 is an absolutely awesome deal!
I had a quick look at the rest of AMD's stack, and here are the best prices I found for the other Ryzen 5000 models:
- Ryzen 7 5800X - $398 at Amazon
- Ryzen 9 5900X - $569 at Newegg
- Ryzen 9 5950X- $779 at Newegg (via Ebay)
Here in the UK, if you're wondering, £240 remains the best price going, same as earlier this month. You can get that price by visiting Currys PC World and using the code FNDDGAMING to knock £5 off the listed price. Not bad!