AMD has some good news for PC builders who might not be able to afford its latest Ryzen 7 CPUs in the form of Ryzen 5.
This edition of Ryzen is the mid-tier of the family with prices sitting below the $300 mark. If you’re looking for something a bit cheaper from AMD, Ryzen 3 is set to launch in the second half of this year so it might be worth holding out a bit longer before you upgrade if you’re on a budget.
For those are looking for a mid-tier solution however, let’s take a look at what Ryzen 5 has to offer.
There are four CPUs in this SKU namely the Ryzen 5 1600X, 1600, 1500X and 1400. As is the case in the Ryzen 7 SKU, the X suffix denotes the inclusion of Extended Frequency Range (XFR) in the CPU.
Cores/Threads | Base Clock/Boost Clock | XFR | TDP | Price | |
Ryzen 5 1600X | 6/12 | 3.6GHz/4.0GHz | Yes | 95W | $249 |
Ryzen 5 1600 | 6/12 | 3.2GHz/3.6GHz | No | 65W | $219 |
Ryzen 5 1500X | 4/8 | 3.5GHz/3.7GHz | Yes | 65W | $189 |
Ryzen 5 1400 | 4/8 | 3.2GHz/3.4GHz | No | 65W | $169 |
All of the Ryzen 5 chips will pair with AMD’s AM4 platform that was launched alongside Ryzen 7 earlier this year.
The top of the range 1600X is said to be going up against Intel’s i5-7600K, a $239 CPU with a base clock of 3.8GHz and a boost of 4.2GHz.
Where Ryzen 5 might hold its own is multi-thread and multi-core performance, particularly in the sense of modern games where workloads are spread across cores said Ars Technica in a report. Of course, we’ll need to wait until release before that can be tested.
Ryzen 5 will be available worldwide on April 11th. Local pricing is yet to be confirmed but we’ll be sure to update you with the pricing as soon as is revealed.