Want to upgrade to Zen 4? Grab a Ryzen 7600 CPU and MSI B650M-A motherboard for $325
That's an $84 discount for the bundle.
AMD's Ryzen 7000 "Zen 4" CPUs are brilliant performers, but as they use a new AM5 socket, upgrading to the new CPU means picking up a new motherboard - and DDR5 RAM. Thankfully, we've started to see a host of discounts on CPU and motherboard combos, including this one from Newegg that bundles a Ryzen 5 7600 CPU and MSI Pro B650M-A WiFi motherboard for $324.99, an $84 savings compared to buying both separately.
The Ryzen 5 7600 is the Zen 4 CPU of choice for most people, as it offers near-identical performance to the Ryzen 7600X while costing significantly less. With six cores and twelve threads, content creation tasks like 3D rendering or video transcoding aren't quite as fast as with the higher core count Ryzen 7000 CPUs, but for gaming this is peak value in terms of frames per dollar.
The motherboard is also a savvy choice, with a simple and compact Micro ATX form factor that works in regular or slightly-smaller-than-usual cases, four slots for DDR5 RAM, two PCIe 4.0 M.2 NVMe slots and built-in wireless, Bluetooth and 2.5-gig networking. This ticks off most of the nice-to-have platform features, along with eight USB ports and HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort 1.4 video outputs for the 7600's integrated graphics. However, PCIe 5.0 isn't supported, which is a bit of a disappointment - but perhaps understandable at this price point.
By comparison, the Ryzen 5 7600 costs $229 by itself, so you're only paying $95 for the motherboard - a pretty awesome deal!