News Ryzen 7000 Retailer Pricing Shows Fair Premium Over Ryzen 5000

Aug 14, 2022
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And at the same time we have worrying stories from Intel and AMD how PC market is collapsing being lowest in 30 years.
I spent 2000+ just 2 years ago on Ryzen 3900 and should I now bin everything and spend 4000 on something a bit more faster?
No just wait a bit longer, i suspect with all competitors with products out , AMD will be forced to lower prices , plus as always any hardware that is new and just released is always costier. A bit of a wait i would imagine by November /December prices will be down.
 

ottonis

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Seems like a great time to build a brand new Ryzen 5000 based system.
A 12 core, 24 thread 5900x costs as little as 350 USD and is plenty of future proof for the next 5+ years. Pair this with plenty of cheap DDR4-RAM, and a B-series Mainboard, and you gonna get a very future proof system at half the price (and probably less power consumption) than a new DDR5-equipped Ryzen 7000 system.
 
If prices are any thing like what they are here when they are finally released I will be quite disappointed. An almost 50% increase in price, what a joke. I was optimistic about Zen 4 but if prices are anything like these leaks, then the price vs performance compared to current gen won't be worth it at all.
 
The pricing comes from PC Canada, and hardware is more expensive outside the U.S. market. There's also a possibility that the listings are placeholders, so treat the pricing with a bit of salt. Compared to MSRP, these prices are reasonable, netting around a 10% to 12% price hike compared to Ryzen 5000 when it first launched. But, these prices are much more drastic now that Ryzen 5000 has been out for a few years and highly discounted in recent months.

Considering this is the only online store offering Ryzen 7000 pre-orders, and AMD isn't even set to announce the CPUs for a couple weeks, this is most likely just placeholder pricing. They likely don't know the pricing, and obviously don't want to sell pre-orders at a price that ends up being lower than MSRP, so they pick the highest possible price they could potentially see the processors launching for.

And no, these prices do not seem reasonable, unless AMD somehow manages to outperform Alder Lake by a wide enough margin that they even stay well ahead of Raptor Lake. Or if they were to increase core counts at each price level, making the 7600X an 8-core part, the 7700X a 12-core, and so on. Otherwise, even if they manage to outperform Intel at some lightly-threaded workloads, it seems unlikely for them to be competitive at heavily multi-threaded tasks with a 6 core, 12 thread 7600X positioned against an 8 core, 16 thread + 4 E-core i7.

Again though, this is probably just the store's guess at what the highest possible prices might be, so that they can offer pre-orders before their competitors without potentially taking a loss on them.
 

bit_user

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It's always easier to start too high, than too low.

If their launch pricing is too high, they can simply use discounting and eventually re-price downward.

If they start too low, they'll have availability problems and it'll be scalpers making the big profits.
 
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bit_user

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I spent 2000+ just 2 years ago on Ryzen 3900 and should I now bin everything and spend 4000 on something a bit more faster?
What are your needs or pain points? And why would you "bin everything", when PCs are upgradable? If you're seriously asking for advice, then you really need to provide more information.

I'd suggest upgrading the parts likely to have the greatest impact. Maybe a simple BIOS + CPU upgrade to a 5950X would be wise, given recent discounts. You could probably get a few $ for the 3900X on ebay, or maybe just hang onto it as a spare.

Maybe take advantage of recent drops in GPU prices, or just wait until new ones launch.

Or, if you have deep pockets, then sure... go for a big upgrade to a 7950X. You could probably still keep your case & PSU, if they can handle the additional power. Also your SSD and GPU, depending on your needs.
 

KyaraM

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Considering this is the only online store offering Ryzen 7000 pre-orders, and AMD isn't even set to announce the CPUs for a couple weeks, this is most likely just placeholder pricing. They likely don't know the pricing, and obviously don't want to sell pre-orders at a price that ends up being lower than MSRP, so they pick the highest possible price they could potentially see the processors launching for.

And no, these prices do not seem reasonable, unless AMD somehow manages to outperform Alder Lake by a wide enough margin that they even stay well ahead of Raptor Lake. Or if they were to increase core counts at each price level, making the 7600X an 8-core part, the 7700X a 12-core, and so on. Otherwise, even if they manage to outperform Intel at some lightly-threaded workloads, it seems unlikely for them to be competitive at heavily multi-threaded tasks with a 6 core, 12 thread 7600X positioned against an 8 core, 16 thread + 4 E-core i7.

Again though, this is probably just the store's guess at what the highest possible prices might be, so that they can offer pre-orders before their competitors without potentially taking a loss on them.
Mmmh, I kinda have my doubts they will outperform Raptor Lake, honestly. It might be a wash between both, which would be preferable from a competition standpoint anyways. It also depends on how Intel sets prices. Judgment is still out for me, honestly.
 

ottonis

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Mmmh, I kinda have my doubts they will outperform Raptor Lake, honestly. It might be a wash between both, which would be preferable from a competition standpoint anyways. It also depends on how Intel sets prices. Judgment is still out for me, honestly.

From a perspective of technological advancement, close competition is always preferable. However, from the perspective of pricing it's better to have one competitor behind the other one, because this is the scenario that reliably provides lower prices (for the less performing product) - at least in the short term. If RL and Zen4 perform similarly, then both could and will demand high prices because there is no other competition in the x86 world. However, if RL loses significantly to Zen4 (or vice versa) the inferior product must compensate with lower prices.
 
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Cheeno76

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I could be wrong but I'd take these prices with a grain of salt. I don't see where the demand will come from. Inflation is real and I don't see it slowing down in this cycle of processors.

And even if it did, Intel nor AMD really holds a distinct advantage over the other. That's the beauty of having competition
 

InvalidError

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AMD priced itself out of the market as far as I was concerned when it launched Zen 3 and now it wants to price Zen 4 even worse in the middle of a PC sales slump? That is going to be interesting.

Doesn't matter to me as I'm not planning to upgrade from the i5-11400 I put together last year within the next four years minimum.
 

Giroro

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If they overcharge, then people won't buy them.

The big challenge AMD and Intel have, is that everybody just barely got done upgrading all at once - which inflated their pricing expectations while tanking demand. Even if their next processors had double the performance of what is available today (and they won't), not a lot of people in the mainstream will care. Next year's computers will offer indistinguishable performance to a non-enthusiast when it comes to web browsing, office work, and zoom calls. Even someone with a Haswell generation processor and an SSD has a similar user experience, or at least they would if Intel's TIM didn't go bad over time and cause thermal problems.

The most common mainstream computers in the world right now are small chromebooks with 2 cores of outdated Celeron, 4GB of RAM and 32GB of SD-card class storage speeds. That setup is really limited, but anybody with at least 4 decent cores/8GB/128GB SATA SSD is doing just fine - Which is something you could almost get out of a Raspberry Pi 4, back when those existed. The limiting part of an RPi being that their cores and storage were exceptionally slow, even by Chromebook standards.

My point is, if a typical home user upgrades every 5 years, then 5 years' worth of upgrade cycles just got compressed down into the same 6 months.
The industry now has a baked-in bubble of demand, and we are going to feel ripples from it for a long time. People who just got gouged are going to wait as long as possible to upgrade, to "get their money's worth". They are at a minimum going to wait until Microsoft works out their Windows 11 disaster.
 
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hannibal

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10 -12% is about the same as inflation, so that sounds about the right estimation if the relative price remains the same. If amd reduce prices, then these are too high, but Intel is gonna increase prices, so if AMD follow the lead, this sound almost too low.
Does anyone has info How much Intel is gonna increase prices? About the inflation number aka 9 to 12% or something else?
 

lmcnabney

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High AMD chip prices + high AM5 motherboard prices + very high DDR5 prices = More sales for Intel

And I am an AMD fanboy that has waited to build to get Zen4.
 

bit_user

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Mmmh, I kinda have my doubts they will outperform Raptor Lake, honestly. It might be a wash between both, which would be preferable from a competition standpoint anyways. It also depends on how Intel sets prices. Judgment is still out for me, honestly.
Well, we know Raptor Lake uses the same cores and the same manufacturing node. So, the only way it gets much faster is:
  • More E-cores (good if you need 'em)
  • Faster clock speeds (as if cooling Alder Lake wasn't already a challenge)
  • Faster DDR5
  • More cache

So, I don't expect much in the way of gains, other than maybe if you're using a high-end cooling solution. The way I see it, Raptor Lake is basically just a refresh of Alder Lake. It's probably not even going to rise to the level of a Coffee Lake or Comet Lake, in terms of real improvements over the previous gen.
 

bit_user

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AMD can't beat Intel with these prices, period. Unless they outperform Intel in every segment, this pricing makes zero sense.
Intel is raising prices, also.

I'm sure the street prices will settle out at a point where AMD can move its inventory, but probably not a lot of margin left for scalpers. From AMD's perspective, that's much more important than "beating Intel".
 

InvalidError

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Intel is raising prices, also.
Wanting to raise prices doesn't equate successfully raising prices. The fab shortages used to justify hikes all around over the last year is mostly over along with a demand crash across most of the PC space. AMD, Intel and Nvidia will likely be forced to compromise if they don't want their revenue to crash from the drop in demand eclipsing any ARPU gains.
 
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bit_user

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if RL loses significantly to Zen4 (or vice versa) the inferior product must compensate with lower prices.
What seems to happen is that one or the other just juices their clock speeds & power consumption to make up the difference. At best, you get more (slower) cores per $, which can give you more aggregate performance if you have software that's really well-threaded.

However, if you want the premium solution, then it's worse for you if it has no real competition.
 

ddcservices

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I see a lot of complaints, but reading some of the responses, not everyone believes in the gloom and doom that others have been putting out there. Since price is an issue, consider the pricing over the past five years. I look at the market in the USA, so the prices in Canada primarily was just the difference between US and Canadian Dollars.

In 2017, the Ryzen 7 1800X was $500 for the MSRP, though many just went to the 1700 at that point and didn't really lose too much. Motherboards, $250 or so for the high end at the time. Go forward to the 2700X, yep, it was a minor upgrade over the 1800X, but clock speed was a bit better, IPC a bit better. Those 400 series chipsets didn't add a lot, and were fundamentally the 300 series chipsets for motherboards.

And then, 2019, Zen2, and the Ryzen 9 3900X had that $500 MSRP for 12 cores. One thing that hurt a bit was that the top end motherboards in the 500 series were now into the $450 range or even higher due to the move to PCIe 4.0 and the need for signal integrity. Or at least, that was the big excuse. So, motherboard prices were now higher, though you could still get budget X570 chipset boards in the $200 range, the feature set had also improved from 2017 to 2019. Zen3 increased the price by $50, but eliminated the budget chips, so no Ryzen 7 5700 or 5700X, and many saw that as a big price increase. Price increase from 3800X to 5800X was....$50. So, prices didn't really go through the roof. $550 for the 5900X.

So, it's been two years since the Zen3 release, if the 7900X is now $600, with inflation, cost for shipping and other things being taken into account, then yea, it's another increase, but $50 more, compared to the 5900X isn't going to scare me. Motherboard price, $450 or so....that's your typical high end board price these days as well, and isn't all that much higher compared to the X570 boards at launch, considering new version of PCIe, more M.2 slots, and other features such as 2.5Gbbps or even 10Gbps ethernet are included.

For RAM, there has always been the option, go for budget RAM, or go for the expensive stuff. Feb of 2017 had 32GB of DDR4-3200CL16 RAM(2x16GB) costing $190 for not even great RAM. If the price of DDR5-6000CL30 EXPO supporting RAM ends up being $350, sure it's high, but it's still early days. If you don't want to pay for the "good stuff", you can get 32GB of DDR5 for $200-$250 as well.

People get very comfortable with just dropping a new CPU into their computer, because AMD has kept socket compatibility very well, especially compared to Intel. So, the idea of actually needing a new motherboard+CPU+RAM all at the same time is what hurts some people. Not everyone needs to go to the high end, or the highest end. Still, I just think, CPU price is really only $50 more than Zen3, or that's what I expect it to end up being. When spending $1200+ for a new motherboard+CPU+RAM, $50 or $100 more today vs. 2020 really doesn't feel like it's that big a deal. Keep in mind that you can use the new motherboard and RAM for your next CPU upgrade or two if you stick with the AMD side of things(2022 to 2024 to 2026 on same motherboard+RAM). In that period of time, you KNOW that you would need to replace your motherboard several times if you were on Alder Lake, or went to Raptor Lake and wanted to upgrade your CPU again in another two to three years, then again in 2026 or 2027. For that sort of use, that $100 or even $200 that you are complaining about for CPU and RAM prices being higher won't seem like such a big deal, would it?