- AMD has announced a new Ryzen 5 9600 processor at CES 2025
- This is a slightly slower version of the already existing Ryzen 5 9600X
- It has a boost speed that’s 200MHz slower, but it’ll be cheaper – though we don’t have a launch price yet
AMD will doubtless be launching a few fresh Zen 5 processors this year – there are only four models in the Ryzen 9000 range thus far, after all – and CES 2025 has seen the company quietly introduce a new CPU to take the title of the most affordable chip.
This is the Ryzen 5 9600, a slightly tamed version of the existing Ryzen 5 9600X, dropping the ‘X’ from the name.
What does that mean in practice? The Ryzen 9600 is exactly the same as the 9600X in terms of its cores and cache (it’s a 6-core, 12-thread chip), the only difference is slightly reduced clock speeds.
The Ryzen 9600 processor drops the base clock from 3.9GHz to 3.8GHz, and the boost speed is reduced from 5.4GHz to 5.2GHz.
This processor can still be overclocked, it’s worth noting – unlike Intel’s non-K silicon, Ryzen CPUs of the non-X variety can be juiced up with some BIOS tinkering – but obviously don’t expect as much room to push clocks with the vanilla flavor of the 9600.
Sadly, we don’t yet have a release date, and oddly, not even an official price, and it appears AMD is keeping this launch on the down-low for now. That’s possibly a hint that the processor may not arrive in the very near future, but it shouldn’t be too far out now that it’s been officially announced.
Analysis: Coolly cheap (with any luck)
It’s good to see a new value champ for the Ryzen 9000 range, and we hope that AMD doesn’t hang around too long with getting the Ryzen 9600 onto shelves, especially since super-budget Ryzen 3 chips seem to be completely AWOL nowadays. It’ll be a useful option for those looking to build (or buy) a more budget-conscious PC, for sure, particularly as there’ll be some extra value proposition because AMD has put in a further twist here.
The Ryzen 9600 will come with a Wraith Stealth cooler, saving PC builders a bit of money because they won’t need to buy a separate CPU cooling solution. No other Ryzen 9000 processors come with AMD’s own cooler bundled - gone are the days when every Ryzen chip came packaged with a Wraith air cooler.
As for the pricing and where that could end up, we have to bear in mind that the Ryzen 9600X arrived with an MSRP of $279 / £269.99 / AU$479, so you might think that the vanilla Ryzen 9600 could come in at $229 / £219 / AU$399, maybe? After all, that’s the price at which AMD launched the Ryzen 7600.
However, AMD dropped the price of the 9600X compared to its predecessor, and also given that the 9600X is now at around $220 to $240 at big retailers in the US, the hope is you might be able to pick up the 9600 for closer to $200 or even less - fingers crossed.
This could help generate more goodwill around the Ryzen 9000 series with consumers – as the Zen 5 range got off to a shaky start – and ensure this is a great option for a budget PC build (alongside the new more affordable B840 and B850 AM5 motherboards which also launched at CES 2025).
Via Tom’s Hardware
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