New Budget Ryzen 5000 and 4000 CPUs!
Intro
Ever since AMD announced their 5000 series of new Zen 3 CPUs in the November of 2022, consumers have been waiting with baited breath for the more budget oriented half of the line up to be announced. Well the wait is finally over! This week AMD released a bunch of new budget CPUs, as well as their new flagship gaming processor: the Ryzen 7 5800X3D. Let's take a look!
Overview
AMD launched a number of new Zen 3, Ryzen 5000 parts, as well as a few new Zen 2 Ryzen 4000 parts. The new Skews are (as previously mentioned), generally more budget oriented, but don't believe for one second that this makes them any less exciting; the budget CPU market has been in serious need of some new parts lately, as AMD's last generation Zen 2, Ryzen 3000 parts simply aren't competitive against Intel's newer 12th Gen skews. Some cheaper 6 and 8 core CPUs have also been released, perfect for gamers on a budget, or part time content creators. And finally AMD have their new Ryzen 7 5800X3D, supposedly the world fastest gaming processor, thanks to AMD's new 3D V-Cache technology. The chips should hopefully be available by April 20th.
Ryzen 7 5800X3D (£449)
Of course the big headline is AMD's new flagship chip, said to outperform their pre-existing Ryzen 9 5900X by a significant margin, and even provide better performance than Intel's Core i9-12900K in most games. The chip is AMD's first commercial chip equipped with their new 3D V-Cache technology, which we should hopefully see more of in AMD's Zen 4, Ryzen 7000 CPUs coming later this year. The chip has 3x the L3 Cache of the ordinary Ryzen 7 5800X, positioned directly on top of the CPU cores. The interconnects between the two of them should be shorter and more numerous than ever before, allowing extremely high bandwidth, and hopefully lots of performance. AMD have unfortunately had to lower some of the CPUs other specs compared to the standard 5800X to accommodate this 3D V-Cache, namely lower base and boost clock speeds, but we'll have to wait to see exactly how this affects the performance of the chip in various workloads.
AMD also made a rather controversial decision regarding this chips overclocking capabilities, locking both the ability to increase the chips multiplier, and voltage. This makes the 5800X3D the first ever Ryzen chip that doesn't support overclocking, hopefully this isn't the beginning of a new trend! The current assumption is that this is related to the new 3D V-Cache that the chip is equipped with, and that this first ever chip with the technology doesn't respond well to overclocking for whatever reason. Luckily this isn't expected to effect the Ryzen 7000 chips equipped with a (hopefully) more mature version of the V-Cache coming later this year.
Ryzen 7 5700X (£299)
The much awaited 5700X finally provides a cheaper Zen 3 8 core alternative to the 5800X released in 2020. Despite having a base clock speed a fair bit lower than the 5800X, the 5700X's boost clock is only 100 MHz lower than that of the 5800X, with a significantly slower TDP and launch price. Other than this the chip looks almost identical, with a launch price £150 cheaper than the 5800X's launch price, making it a very attractive deal. Admittedly the 5800X has reduced quite a bit in price since it first launched, and can often be had for £350 or less, but the 5700X could still be a good deal. The jury is out on this one, at least until independent reviews begin to be released.
Ryzen 5 5600 (£199)
The 5600 provides a cheaper alternative to the very popular 5600X released in 2020, a very capable 6 core gaming processor, coming surprisingly close to its bigger brothers, the 5800X and 5900X in most games. The 5600 adds just a little extra flexibility to the midrange gaming market at this price point, with slightly lower base and boost clocks, and a launch price a full £100 below that of the 5600X. The 5600X has reduced significantly in price since launch, similarly to the 5800X, so just how much better value this chip will be is yet to be seen!
Ryzen 5 5500 (£159)
The Ryzen 5 5500 is the first of three new chips released using a new trick of AMD's: using a cut down APU architecture. This provides AMD with the ability to use and sell their faulty Zen 2 and Zen 3 APU chips, allowing AMD to sell these chips at a lower price, which is good for everyone. Just to be clear, these CPUs have their integrated graphics functionality disabled, and unfortunately suffer from some of the limitations present in AMD's APU architectures (namely reduced L3 Cache, and feature support, for instance only supporting PCIe 3.0, and having no support for ECC Memory). Never the less, the 5500 should still be a great CPU choice for anyone seeking a high core count, high performance CPU on a budget, as the chip still contains 6 multithreaded Zen 3 cores, and should hopefully still provide some pretty impressive performance, at a relatively low price!
Ryzen 5 4500 (£129)
The Ryzen 5 4500 is one of AMD's new additions to it's 4000 series lineup. The series originally only contained a precious few Zen 2 APUs, however there are now two new exciting additions: the 4500, and the 4100. The 4500 is another chip featuring a cut down APU architecture, and suffers from all of the problems listed previously, however the chip should provide a great low cost, high core count CPU with, if not ground breaking, at least respectable, single threaded performance as well. All for only £129 at launch! Despite the use of the last generation Zen 2 microarchitecture, the 4500 should still provide solid performance for both gaming and every day tasks. The 6 cores also makes it eligible for use in slightly more computationally taxing use cases as well! A 6 core modern CPU for £129. What more is there to say?
Ryzen 3 4100 (£99)
And if you're on a really tight budget, the Ryzen 3 4100 provides a relatively low cost, good value, entry level chip. The CPU seems to be positioned to take over from the Ryzen 3 3100 launched previously, and designed to compete with the Core i3-10100, 10105, and 12100 from Intel. Although the performance of the AMD chip may well be lower than the Intel chips (the 12100 in particular), one thing the Ryzen 3 4100 holds over Intel's offerings is its upgrade path: the 4100 can be upgraded all the way up to AMD's latest and greatest, on any of the motherboards the 4100 support. By way of contrast, the 10100 and 10105 can only be upgraded to Intel's 10900K, or 11900K, Intel's last generation offering, neither of which were particularly impressive. The 12100 is also far more expensive than the 4100, so a performance comparison isn't really fair here. If you're on a budget, but an upgrade is on the cards later on, I would definitely advise getting AMD's 4100 over any Core i3.
Conclusion
All in all, there's a lot to be excited about in AMD's latest product launch, for consumer's at every price point! Obviously we can't know everything for sure until we get to see some 3rd party hands on reviews, but on paper there's a lot that looks very promising. If you're looking To buy a new c budget CPU at the moment, I would most certainly advise waiting a short while until the 20th of April, when the chips become officially available. I can't wait, and hope that now you can't either, and understand just how important growth in all segments of the CPU market is!
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