AMD’s new Ryzen desktop processors are being priced across the board in the days following launch, with prices slashed by over seven percent to help boost sales of the new lineup, which hasn’t received particularly good reviews.
The Ryzen 9 9900X and 9950X only launched on August 14 of this month and were more powerful than their predecessors, had lower launch prices and lower power consumption in multi-threaded applications. The new 9000-series CPUs, with their Zen 5 architecture, struggled to offer the significant performance gains we’ve seen from AMD in the past and were much slower in some games than the gaming-focused 3D V-Cache titles.
AMD Ryzen 5 9600X
As a result, performance did not justify an upgrade from the previous generation, many of which offered better value due to recent price cuts. Unsurprisingly, this has translated into poor initial sales and, at least in Germany, where there are a large number of retailers, competition for these early sales has already led to falling prices.
We usually only see price cuts on new CPUs after they have been in the market for a long time, often in the final months before the next generation is launched. However, websites Hardware & Co and Videocardz found that prices in Germany were already lower than those quoted to German testers in euros, compared to launch day prices.
For example, the Ryzen 9 9900X was supposed to retail for EUR 539, but was instead listed on price comparison websites for just EUR 499, over seven percent less than the launch price. It’s clearly the two mid-range processors that retailers were most concerned about selling, as the Ryzen 7 9700X saw the next biggest drop at EUR 379 against a launch price of EUR 399, or around five percent.
The flagship Ryzen 9 9950X was spotted for just EUR 699, down from a launch price of EUR 709, and the cheapest Ryzen 9000 CPU – the Ryzen 5 9600X – was offered for EUR 299, down from the launch price of EUR 309. Other countries in the region have not been so lucky. In the UK, for example, prices are in line with those at launch, and in the US, there have been no significant price cuts so far.
There are also rumored fixes for the Ryzen 9000 processors, which had a performance-degrading bug in Windows, while AMD itself may even roll out a BIOS update that increases the power limits of some Ryzen 9000 CPUs to further boost performance. The Ryzen 9000 series has always been a tough sell, with Ryzen 7000 prices dropping significantly in some cases, while the Ryzen 7000 3D V-Cache models outperformed the Ryzen 9000 series in most games.
We’re also expecting a number of 3D V-Cache Ryzen 9000 series models in the coming months, which could push the first Ryzen 9000 CPUs even further into the category of general-purpose CPUs that you should probably avoid if you’re building a PC for gaming.
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