AMD’s Ryzen 5 5600X gaming CPU is down to £185 in the UK

In many ways, AMD’s Ryzen 5 5600X processor is the perfect gaming CPU, offering extremely good performance for games and content creation while consuming little heat, working with very inexpensive motherboards and coming with a free, perfectly capable CPU cooler. The CPU’s only major drawback on launch was its price: £280. Now, the Ryzen 5 5600X is retailing for just £185 at Currys in the UK when you use the code FNDDGAMINGbringing a heretofore unseen level of performance to this price point.

So why is the 5600X getting cheaper all of a sudden? I’d say there are three main reasons: Intel suddenly has a proper competitor in the form of the 12400F, AMD just released even cheaper Ryzen 5000 models, and the company is also planning to release Ryzen 6000 CPUs in the second half of this year . All of these conspire to push the Ryzen 5 5600X down in price, where I’d argue it makes a lot of sense to pick up this CPU.

After all, while Intel’s 12th-gen LGA1700 socket and AMD’s next-gen AM5 socket will no doubt bring advantages 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 that finding a compatible motherboard is super easy. There are loads of cheap options available, and even high-end X570 motherboards with PCIe 4.0 are affordable at this stage in their life cycle. Similarly, DDR4 offers near-identical performance to currently-available DDR5 kits in most applications, including games, while costing way less. There are also many more CPU coolers available with AM4 support out of the box, compared to LGA 1700 which may require a separate purchase to ensure compatibility. So sticking with the tried and true means that the overall cost of your build is way lower than if you went with an upcoming Ryzen 7000 CPU or already-released 12th-gen Intel Core CPU.

And despite being some months away from being superceded, the 5600X still radically outperforms earlier AMD and Intel CPUs, especially Ryzen 1000 and 2000 series CPUs that had a heavy deficit in single-core performance. The 5600X’s single cores are absolutely killer, and with six of them (and 12 threads) on tap, you have enough to deal with even modern game engines or to do 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 want the single-core speed of the 5600X rather than the higher core counts of something like the Ryzen 3700X.

So, that’s my argument: the 5600X remains a competitive CPU when it comes to gaming, with a vastly cheaper ecosystem that enables you to save a ton of money versus investing into AM4 or LGA 1700 – potentially letting you save for a more impactful next- Gen GPU that will have a much bigger impact on gaming performance, particularly at 1440p or 4K.

What do you think – is it a fair argument? Let me know in the comments below.