AMD Ryzen 5 9600X
Let’s face it, this is the Ryzen you’re going to buy.
The first salvo of AMD’s Zen 5 Ryzen 9000 processors are here. The new chips span from the £269 six-core 12-thread Ryzen 5 9600X to the £594 16-core 32-thread Ryzen 9 9950X, covering the same segments as the prior-gen Zen 4 Ryzen 7000s. The chips have the same core counts as their predecessors, with a new architecture offering significant performance and efficiency improvements. The Ryzen 9000 chips drop into the existing AM5 socket, which AMD will support until at least 2027.
The Ryzen 5 9600X replaces the Ryzen 5 7600X in the £300 price bracket. Pricing-wise, the 9600X contends directly with Intel’s Core i5-14600K, a lacklustre Raptor Lake Refresh family member that offers little over its predecessor, the Core i5-13600K. The Ryzen 5 9600X gets a slight 100MHz clock rate increase to a 5.4GHz boost, but the company also dialled the base clock back by 800MHz, which helps reduce the TDP. The move to the TSMC 4nm process and the efficiency of the Zen 5 architecture allowed AMD to drastically reduce the 9600X’s rating to 65/88W, a 40% reduction. Coupled with the amount of performance the company manages to wring from the silicon, AMD says the lower power consumption leads to a 22% gain in power efficiency (perf-per-watt). The £269 Ryzen 5 9600X delivers strong processing at its price point. At stock settings, the £300 Core i5-14600K is 4% faster in 1080p gaming. Bear in mind that the Ryzen 5 9600X delivers these results from within a 65W TDP envelope.