AMD's Ryzen 7000 processors recently hit the retail market on September 27. According to Chinese publication Expreview, the Zen 4-based chips have already seen their first discounts in less than two months. In addition, Ryzen 7000 chips, among the best CPUs, are now cheaper in China than in the U.S., The discounts are likely in celebration of Singles' Day, an unofficial holiday in China that’s celebrated on November 11. It’s equivalent to our Black Friday.
The Ryzen 9 7950X launched at $765 but now sells for $557 on JD.com, 27% cheaper than when it first came out. That's a 27% price reduction, which is very steep considering that it's the flagship Zen 4 chip. In addition, the Ryzen 9 7950X is 20% cheaper in China than in the U.S., where the 16-core part still maintains its MSRP ($699).
On the other hand, the Ryzen 9 7900X saw a slightly smaller price cut, albeit still a significant one. The 12-core chip, which used to sell for $598, retails for $459 at JD.com. The new price tag is 23% lower than the original and 16% lower than the U.S. pricing.
Header Cell - Column 0 | New China Pricing | Original China Pricing | U.S. Pricing | Cores / Threads (P+E) | Base / Boost Clock (GHz) | Cache (L2+L3) | TDP / Max | Memory |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Ryzen 9 7950X | $557 | $765 | $699 | 16 / 32 | 4.5 / 5.7 | 80MB | 170W / 230W | DDR5-5200 |
Ryzen 9 7900X | $459 | $598 | $549 | 12 / 24 | 4.7 / 5.6 | 76MB | 170W / 230W | DDR5-5200 |
Ryzen 7 7700X | $320 | $417 | $399 | 8 / 16 | 4.5 / 5.4 | 40MB | 105W / 142W | DDR5-5200 |
Ryzen 5 7600X | $236 | $313 | $299 | 6 / 12 | 4.7 / 5.3 | 38MB | 105W / 142W | DDR5-5200 |
Similar to the Ryzen 9 5900X, the Ryzen 7 7700X costs 23% less. The chip, which used to sell for $417, goes for $320. Chinese consumers are saving up to $79 or 20% as opposed to U.S. buyers that still pay the $399 MSRP. The Ryzen 5 7600X saw a 25% decrease in pricing, dropping from $313 to $236. The same chip is 21% less expensive in China now than in the U.S.
Overall, the Ryzen 7000 and AM5 platform is an expensive ecosystem. AMD X670 motherboards range from $250 to $1,300; even the more budget-friendly B650 models start at $190. The more premium B650 motherboards cost up to $450, effectively crossing into X670 territory. Furthermore, AMD's decision to forsake the DDR4 standard in favor of the more expensive DDR5 memory doesn't help alleviate adoption, either.
It's not hard to see why Ryzen 7000 may need a little push to help improve sales. For example, Micro Center started offering free 32GB DDR5-5600 memory kits with Ryzen 7000 purchases. The memory kit alone has a $189.99 value. We can always look forward to Black Friday, where we'll no doubt find some good deals on Ryzen 7000.
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Zhiye Liu is a news editor and memory reviewer at Tom’s Hardware. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.
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TechieTwo In my opinion Ryzen 7000 prices are not unreasonable but AM5 mobos costing in excess of $500 are. Thankfully Asrock and perhaps other brands do offer perfectly fine, fully optioned mobos for $300 or less in the U.S. I don't see any justification for AM5 mobos costing in excess of $500 other than price gouging of the gullible.Reply
YMMV -
DavidLejdar For "casual use", the most expensive MBs sure are excessive. These MBs usually offer something extra though, such as better VRM, better audio codec, and/or more SATA ports. So e.g. professionals working with music and/or sound, they may prefer an option which goes beyond what the usual end-user needs.Reply -
BogdanH Hopefully 7000X price cut will follow soon in the rest of the world. And if similar happens with motherboards, I might seriously consider new system.Reply
Just thinking aloud here... -
LastStanding All this does is to confirm what wise consumers already knew for years anyway. NEVER purchase any AMD, etc. product at launch, unless the worst has happened and you need an replacement fast.Reply -
hotaru251
MB & ram are big hurdles for sure.TechieTwo said:In my opinion Ryzen 7000 prices are not unreasonable but AM5 mobos costing in excess of $500 are.
but the cpu also too much when intel's beat em across board for less (and not a small amount less) -
daworstplaya I guess the market has spoken, prices for AMD CPUs and Mobos were too high on release. They should've released with 20% lower MSRPs to begin with, IMHO. I'll consider the upgrade if the prices drop by 25%, if not I'm perfectly fine with the system I currently have.Reply -
thisisaname Could be a pre Singles' Day sale (11th of November in China), in the same way all of November is now pre-Black Friday sales.Reply -
LuxZg Well, just checked, prices here in Croatia are same as few weeks ago, I'd say DDR5 got bit worse actually (price same but mass of 4800 DIMMs). I did find cheap MBO, but it's all PCIe 4.0 (?) (Edit: 212€ incl. 25% VAT)Reply
https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/B650M-DS3H-rev-10/sp#spOverall, still waiting -
wr3zzz Like the above post said, it's not apple to apple if you compare 11/11 sales prices to retail.Reply
Under current management Tomshardware probably will make up headline of "massive price drop of xxx chips!!!" using Black Friday sales prices as if these prices were regular retail. -
abufrejoval LastStanding said:All this does is to confirm what wise consumers already knew for years anyway. NEVER purchase any AMD, etc. product at launch, unless the worst has happened and you need an replacement fast.
I'd just say: never buy anything you don't need or cannot get value from.
When I got my first 5800X just after launch, I needed a workstation much faster and bigger than anything I had. At 128GB RAM I wanted ECC and there was simply nothing else anywhere near that range from Intel or else, so I grabbed one of the very few Ryzen 5000 CPUs that were available when it launched. I really wanted the 16 core, but those were gone before I could even blink and would not return for months, even at scraper prices.
I swapped it perhaps a year later, when the 16 core prices had come down to earth and I was able to sell the 8 core at a reasonable €100 loss over a year or so.
I've never earned money on IT hardware that got more valuable after purchase, but I've made plenty of money using hardware that I bought. So I don't feel like complaining about dropping prices, but I also try to hit behind the very leading edge--if there is a choice.
For my latest upgrade, replacing a Haswell quad-core Xeon 24x7 lab server board, there just wasn't any DDR4 W680 board with ECC that could actually be bought and DDR5 ECC is again twice as expensive as DDR5--if you can get it. Both Ryzen 7000 and Raptor Lake failed in pricing and availability for a low noise server.
So finally I got a 5800X3D instead (yes, after the price drop), with 64GB DDR4-3200 ECC and an X570S mainboard, that actually lets me use my GPU, my RAID6 SmartRAID controller and my 10Gbit Ethernet NIC, which none of the current crop of Ryzen 7000 boards allow (Intel W680 would, but it's vaporware).
For €1000 total it's perhaps 80% current theoretical optimum at 50% price, but it's twice everything the Haswell offered almost 10 years ago, except noise, heat and price.
Not going for the absolutely leading edge is good advice generally, not something I see more true for AMD.
That's why the 16-core workstation got its RTX 3090 upgrade just a couple of months ago at half of what an RTX 4090 is going for now. I see it as an RTX4080 with 24GB of CUDA friendly VRAM. Perhaps that's one of the reasons why their prices seem to be going up, even if Nvidia has surplus stock.