In many ways, AMD’s Ryzen 5 5600X processor is the perfect gaming CPU, offering extremely good performance for gaming and content creation while consuming little heat, working with very cheap motherboards and with a free perfectly performing one CPU cooler is supplied. The CPU’s only major downside at launch was its price: £280. Now the Ryzen 5 5600X is available to retail at Currys in the UK for just £185 when you use the code FNDDGAMINGbringing an unprecedented level of performance at this price point.
Why is the 5600X suddenly becoming cheaper? I’d say there are three main reasons: Intel suddenly has a proper competitor in the 12400F, AMD just released even cheaper Ryzen 5000 models, and the company plans to release Ryzen 6000 CPUs as well in the second half of this year. All of this conspires to push down the price of the Ryzen 5 5600X, which I would argue makes a lot of sense to buy this CPU.
While Intel’s 12th gen LGA1700 socket and AMD’s next gen AM5 socket will no doubt bring benefits like PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 compatibility, the AM4 socket used by the 5600X has been around for years at this point – and that means Finding a compatible motherboard is super easy. There are many cheap options out there, and even high-end PCIe 4.0 X570 motherboards are affordable at this stage in their lifecycle. Similarly, in most applications, including gaming, DDR4 offers nearly identical performance to currently available DDR5 kits while costing much less. There are also many more CPU coolers available with AM4 support compared to LGA 1700, which may need to be purchased separately to ensure compatibility. So sticking with the tried and tested means the overall cost of your build is much lower than if you were to go with an upcoming Ryzen 7000 CPU or an already-released 12th Gen Intel Core CPU.
And while the 5600X is a few months away from being replaced, the 5600X still radically outperforms previous AMD and Intel CPUs, particularly the Ryzen 1000 and 2000 series CPUs, which suffered from a severe deficit in single-core performance . The 5600X’s individual cores are absolutely killer, and with six of them (and 12 threads) on call, you’ll have enough to handle even modern game engines or content creation workloads like video transcoding or simultaneous gaming and streaming. Of course, having more cores and threads would be even better, but for gaming you’ll want the single-core speed of the 5600X rather than the higher core count of something like the Ryzen 3700X.
So that’s my argument: the 5600X remains a competitive CPU when it comes to gaming, with a far more affordable ecosystem that can save you a ton of money rather than investing in AM4 or LGA 1700 – potentially allowing you to go for one save for a more effective next step. Gen GPU that will have a much bigger impact on gaming performance, especially at 1440p or 4K.
What do you think – is it a fair argument? Let me know in the comments below.