AMD has announced official pricing for its first four Ryzen 9000 processors, which are due to be released later in August (after a slight delay), and there’s good news and bad news – sort of.
The good news is that the MSRP of the next-generation CPU quartet will launch at cheaper prices than the current Ryzen 7000 counterparts. The not so good news, however, is that the prices aren’t quite as low as a retailer leak suggested, at least not for the Ryzen 9 models.
AMD Ryzen 9000 Series processors are ready to deliver premium gaming and creative performance. Available August 8: • Ryzen 7 9700X• Ryzen 5 9600X Available August 15: • Ryzen 9 9950X• Ryzen 9 9900X pic.twitter.com/L9YOAyKmHg6 August 2024
As it turns out, the Ryzen 9 9950X will cost $649 in the US, and its sister model, the Ryzen 9 9900X, is said to cost $499. In both cases, that’s $50 more than a recent leak suggested (with the caveat that one source, Newegg, did give the correct price for the flagship, to be fair – but all retailers were wrong about the 9900X). However, both MSRPs are still $50 less than the launch price of the 7950X and 7900X.
Retailers were right to accidentally publish pricing for the Ryzen 7 9700X at $359 and the Ryzen 5 9600X at $279 (a decrease of $40 and $20, respectively, from the previous generation).
These are all US prices and we don’t have confirmation for other regions yet. In theory, with proportional price reductions, we can expect around 7-10% lower MSRPs in other countries. However, when sales and import duties are taken into account, it’s likely that regions outside the US won’t see quite as much downward trend.
Analysis: Perhaps a surprising reduction?
Okay, so in this case the good news definitely outweighs the bad. After all, AMD is making a new generation of Zen 5-powered desktop chips that are almost 10% cheaper across the entire lineup than the current generation (at least in these initial launches) – you can’t blame that.
In some ways, we’re surprised Team Red has cut prices at all. After all, Intel’s next-gen Arrow Lake CPUs may still be a long way off, effectively putting Ryzen 9000 chips in competition with an old and underwhelming refresh of Raptor Lake silicon. (And Raptor Lake is now nearly two years old.) Plus, Intel is currently knee-deep in a quagmire of stability issues that, at least according to some online conversations, are keeping some people from choosing Team Blue for their CPUs.
In some ways, we think AMD could have done without a price cut altogether – except perhaps for the fact that some Ryzen 7000 models have now dropped well below their RRPs and Ryzen 9000 must make some sense from that perspective.
A particularly insightful comparison for PC gamers will be how the new Zen 5 line workhorse 9700X stacks up against the 7800X3D in terms of price-performance, as the latter is only about 5% more expensive at current prices. There’s been some excitement about this due to a previous AMD reveal, so many eyes are on this particular gaming CPU comparison.
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