AMD Announces its new Ryzen 5 CPUs

Six cores or four; take your pick…

Today AMD is announcing four new Ryzen 5 branded CPUs ranging from $249 down to $169. At the top we have a pair of six-core models and rounding out the bottom a matching pair of quad cores. Base clocks start at 3.2 GHz with turbo clock scaling up to 4 Ghz. While the Ryzen 5 1400 might arrive with a rather weak 3.4 Ghz boost clock all Ryzen CPU are unlocked from the factory. This makes the $169 SKUs a good bet for value-conscious customers who aren’t impressed by the X factor of higher end models.

This pricing structure puts AMD’s Ryzen 5 1600X up against Intel’s Core i5-7600K, the 1600 against the i5-7600 non-K, the 1500X up against the i5-7500, and the 1400 is left to take on Intel’s i3-7300. In all cases, AMD’s chips offer more cores, more threads, and unlocked clock multipliers. We can’t wait to get our hands a Ryzen 5 1400.

These Ryzen 5 SKUs are coming to market in the second week of April with more SKUs and even some APUs coming later this year. AMD promised a complete Ryzen product and today we know what their midrange looks like.S|A

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Thomas Ryan is a freelance technology writer and photographer from Seattle, living in Austin. You can also find his work on SemiAccurate and PCWorld. He has a BA in Geography from the University of Washington with a minor in Urban Design and Planning and specializes in geospatial data science. If you have a hardware performance question or an interesting data set Thomas has you covered.