AMD has revealed the official pricing for its first four Ryzen 9000 processors, due out later in August (after being slightly delayed), and it’s a case of good news and bad news – at least, sort of.
The good news is that the quartet of next-gen CPUs will debut at cheaper MSRPs than their current Ryzen 7000 equivalents launched at, but the not-so-great tidings are that the price tags aren’t quite as cheap as a retailer leak suggested, at least not in the case of Ryzen 9 models.
AMD Ryzen 9000 Series processors are ready to deliver world class gaming and creator performance. Available Aug 8: • Ryzen 7 9700X• Ryzen 5 9600X Available Aug 15: • Ryzen 9 9950X• Ryzen 9 9900X pic.twitter.com/L9YOAyKmHgAugust 6, 2024
It turns out that the Ryzen 9 9950X will cost $649 in the US, and its sibling the Ryzen 9 9900X is pitched at $499. In both cases, that’s $50 more than a recent leak indicated (with the caveat that one source, Newegg, did pin the correct price on the flagship, to be fair – but all retailers were wrong about the 9900X). However, both MSRPs are still $50 under the launch price of the 7950X and 7900X.
The retailers were correct in the accidentally aired pricing for the Ryzen 7 9700X at $359, and the Ryzen 5 9600X at $279 (a drop of $40 and $20 respectively, gen-on-gen).
All of these are US prices, and we don’t have confirmation for other regions yet. In theory, if we see proportional reductions, we can expect around 7% to 10% knocked off MSRPs in other countries. However, when factoring in sales and import duties, it’s likely that regions outside the US may not see quite the same level of downward movement.
Analysis: A surprising reduction, perhaps?
Okay, so the good news outweighs the negative in this case, certainly. After all, AMD is making a new generation of Zen 5-toting desktop silicon the best part of 10% cheaper than the current-gen all down the range (at least with these initial product launches) – you can’t look unfavorably on that.
In some respects, we’re surprised that Team Red has lowered pricing at all. After all, Intel’s next-gen Arrow Lake CPUs are still a good way off, perhaps, so Ryzen 9000 chips are effectively entering into battle with an old, and not too convincing, refresh of Raptor Lake silicon. (And Raptor Lake is almost two years old now). Plus, Intel is currently knee-deep in a mire of stability issues that are, at least going by some online chatter, putting off some folks from picking Team Blue for their CPUs.
In some ways, we bet AMD could have gone without reducing pricing at all – except maybe for the fact that some Ryzen 7000 models have sunk quite some way below their MSRPs now, and Ryzen 9000 must make some sort of sense when viewed from that perspective, too.
One particularly telling comparison for PC gamers will be how the new 9700X workhorse of the Zen 5 range stands up to the 7800X3D, in terms of price/performance ratio, as the latter is only about 5% more expensive with current pricing. There was something of a flap about this due to a previous AMD revelation, so there are plenty of eyes fixed on that particular CPU shootout for gaming.
Via VideoCardz
