We’ve caught another price leak for AMD’s imminent Zen 5 processors, and it’s for the lowest-end CPU of the initial offerings that’ll be debuting with Ryzen 9000 at the end of July – but sadly, it doesn’t look like great news.
2AMD still hasn’t revealed pricing for Ryzen 9000, even if we have had the July 31 release date confirmed (Image Credit: AMD)
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Keep plenty of caution in reserve with any price leak of course. It could be a placeholder, but the source is Amazon in Canada – more reliable than your average retailer leak, in theory – and the product listing for the Ryzen 5 9600X shows a pre-order price of $472 CAD.
As Tom’s Hardware, which spotted this, points out, going with a simple currency conversion to try to determine a potential US price from that isn’t a very useful exercise. These things never translate directly (thanks to import and sales taxes, for starters), so we can glean more – still keep that salt handy though – from looking at comparative US Amazon pricing versus Canadian for the current-gen CPU (7600X).
This is about 1.5x more expensive in Canada, meaning the US price is about two-thirds, so if we apply that to the listed $472 CAD, we get a US price tag of around $318.
Remember that the Ryzen 7600X was released at $300 in the US, so if the 9600X price works out at about $318 or so, that’s approximately a 5% premium at launch compared to its predecessor. As we said, not great news.
A balanced picture
Now, elsewhere from Canadian retailers we have seen other price leaks that suggest the 9600X will roughly maintain its price, so we have to bear that in mind too.
On the one hand, that feels more likely, but on the other, if AMD is feeling particularly brazen about how quickly Ryzen 9000 is coming out compared to Intel’s next-gen rival, Arrow Lake – well, maybe Team Red could take a chance on pushing slight price increases. Let’s hope not, but the prospect isn’t exactly unthinkable.
Upwards movement with pricing would be particularly disappointing for a CPU sat in a mainstream space like the Ryzen 9600X. A 5% hike for the likes of a flagship processor probably won’t cause much consternation for the enthusiasts who buy at that level, and throw plenty of money around on their rigs anyway.
However, for those looking at a workhorse chip with an affordable price tag, that small increase could be a bitter pill – but we have to underline that we don’t know if this is happening yet. Not by a long shot, although the good news is that we don’t have long to wait until we discover the official MSRP.
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