If you’ve been eagerly watching and waiting for the price of AMD’s new Zen 5 CPUs to drop, then you now have a great chance to scoop up a bargain. The AMD Ryzen 5 9600X is now at its cheapest ever price in this Amazon gaming CPU deal, enabling you to save $39 on the usual price. It’s a limited-time deal, though, so you’ll need to get in quickly.
This new AMD CPU was originally launched at an MSRP of $279, which has always made it a hard sell when its predecessor, the Ryzen 5 7600X, has a much cheaper price. At $240, though, the new CPU makes a lot more sense, with this deal saving you 14% on the list price. It doesn’t have the 3D V-cache of the new Ryzen 7 9800X3D to boost gaming performance, but it’s a solid foundation if you want to build a gaming PC on a budget.
On the face of it, a six-core CPU might look a bit weedy compared to the huge core counts seen on more expensive CPUs, but in actuality, six cores is absolutely fine for the vast majority of today’s games. What’s more, this CPU’s peak boost clock of 5.4GHz gives it a decent amount of gaming power to feed your GPU with frame information.
That’s a 100MHz boost over this chip’s predecessor, which is already a solid gaming CPU choice, as we found in our Ryzen 5 7600X review. Meanwhile, the use of the new Zen 5 architecture over the Zen 4 core used in the 7600X gives it a performance boost, with AMD claiming that Zen 5 offers a 16% improvement in the number of instructions per clock (IPC) it can process, compared to previous generations.
You’ll need a Socket AM5 motherboard if you want to run this CPU, so check out our guide to the best gaming motherboard if you don’t have one already. You also need to use DDR5 RAM with this chip, as there’s no support for DDR4, so take a look at our best gaming RAM guide to see which memory will work best with your new CPU.
To take advantage of this deal in the US, you just need to click on this link here to take you directly to the Amazon offer, but you’ll need to get in quick before it goes. If you’re in the UK, you can also currently pick up the 9600X for just £224.98 at this link here, saving you £45.01 on the MSRP.
If you’re looking for the very best in gaming performance, check out our Ryzen 7 9800X3D review, where we benchmark AMD’s latest chip with 3D V-cache. It’s the best gaming CPU you can buy right now, but it’s also hard to find in stock.
