AMD's excellent Ryzen 5 7600X gaming CPU has finally dropped under £200
It launched last year at £330, making for a huge Black Friday discount.
AMD's Ryzen 5 7600X is a fearsomely powerful CPU for gaming, but its high price point of £330 made it something of a hard sell on debut. Today it's much more reasonably priced, with a final Black Friday discount dropping it to just £200. That's an awesome price for a CPU that often competes directly against Intel's recent Core i7 and Core i9 lineup, and should make a solid basis for your next gaming PC whether that's a new build or an upgrade of an existing system.
Despite having just six cores and twelve threads, the Ryzen 5 7600X is a terrific and efficient performer that is well-suited for gaming up to 4K and performs best when paired with some DDR5-6000 RAM - as you can be read in our Ryzen 5 7600X review. By default, it'll boost a little higher than the similarly-priced 7600 and 7500F, and it has a higher TDP allowing it to reach higher performance levels in all-core workloads too. However, versus Intel's competition, particularly at the top end, it's a very cool and efficient design that is easy to keep cool - so you don't need to spring for an expensive CPU tower cooler or AiO to extract maximum performance.
Another benefit to the 7600X is that you have plenty of scope for later upgrades, with eight, 12 and 16-core designs offering better multi-tasking performance and the firm's X3D chips offering a big boost to gaming performance - both at a higher price point, of course. You should also expect at least one more generation of CPUs to be released on the same socket, if not more, so you'll have even more options to choose from down the line without requiring a motherboard or RAM upgrade.
If you can't stretch to the AMD Ryzen 7800X3D right now (which has also had its price slashed), the 7600X is a great launch pad into AM5.
You can also pick up the non-X AMD Ryzen 7600 variant for a slightly lower £195 (was £250) from Amazon if you want a CPU that comes with a cooler and doesn't have as high of a TDP.
Either one will be a great choice and you will still get a lot for your money.