AMD's Ryzen 7 5700X is one of the best offerings in the company's latest salvo of chips, and today you can score this eight-core 16-thread processor for $249 at Amazon, a savings of $50 and an all-time low price. Meanwhile, the recently-released Ryzen 5 5600 has been marked down to $179, a savings of $20.
The Ryzen 7 5700X and Ryzen 5 5600 come with all of the hallmarks of AMD's Zen 3 Ryzen 5000 processors, so they support features like DDR4-3200 and the PCIe 4.0 interface.
At launch, our primary reservations with the Ryzen 7 5700X centered around price — the $299 MSRP didn't feel like much of a reduction from the ever-so-slightly better Ryzen 7 5800X. However, the $250 price point you'll find with this deal is a markedly better prospect — given that the Ryzen 7 5700X will drop right into existing motherboards, it's a no-brainer for upgraders because it is essentially identical to its higher-tier counterpart.
The Ryzen 7 5700X fully supports overclocking, including the memory. The chip doesn't come with a bundled cooler, but upgraders will be happy to know that any AM4-compatible cooler will work, provided it can handle the 5700X's 65W TDP. If you're interested in overclocking, you'll have to ensure that your existing cooler can handle the chip, though.
Above, you can see that the Ryzen 7 5700X holds its own against some of the best CPUs for gaming, and it has a pretty solid showing on our CPU benchmarks hierarchy, too. AMD's other offerings, like the Ryzen 5 5600 and 5500, are also great for upgraders, but the 5700X brings more threaded heft to the table for heavier applications, which includes game streaming. That makes it a wonderful choice if you want to upgrade your existing Ryzen system with a chip that offers more performance in heavily-threaded applications than the lower-end alternatives.
Meanwhile, the $179 Ryzen 5 5600 is a six-core 12-thread chip that boosts to 4.4 GHz and comes with a bundled Wraith Stealth cooler, so you won't have to worry about buying a cooler if you're cobbling together a system.
But, perhaps most importantly, these chips drop into almost all existing AM4 motherboards after a BIOS update — that includes motherboards dating back to the 300-series that debuted in 2017 (double-check your board, though). So if you own a first- or second-gen Ryzen system, you can simply drop these chips in and not worry about swapping out other components. That's an inexpensive path to a big leap forward in performance, particularly if you're rocking a first-gen Ryzen system.
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