I tested the Ryzen 5 9600X against the best budget gaming CPU — here’s the winner

AMD is back with a new budget CPU that’s aiming to make it among the best gaming processors. The Ryzen 5 9600X debuts the Zen 5 architecture, and it comes with some performance improvements over last-gen’s Ryzen 5 7600X. As you can read in our Ryzen 5 9600X review, however, it’s not a slam dunk for AMD’s latest.

Big price drops on AMD’s last-gen Ryzen 5 7600X have made it a very impressive budget CPU. Although the latest Ryzen 5 9600X is clearly faster across benchmarks, the Ryzen 5 7600X stands out with an exceptional value.

By the specs

There isn’t much new for the specs on the Ryzen 5 9600X. Both it and the last-gen Ryzen 5 7600X come with six cores and 12 threads, identical cache amounts, and the same 65W TDP. The only difference on paper is a 100MHz boost to clock speed on the Ryzen 5 9600X — that’s not really moving the needle much on its own.

The difference between these two chips comes down to architecture. The Ryzen 5 9600X uses the Zen 5 architecture, which has a few key advantages over the Zen 4 architecture featured on the Ryzen 5 7600X. For Zen 5, AMD had a big focus on single core performance, and that shows up clearly in my performance testing. Zen 5 also features a dedicated 512-bit data path for AVX-512 instructions, which is a massive boost for everything from AI workloads to PS3 emulation.

This new architecture undoubtedly gives the Ryzen 5 9600X an edge in real applications. That edge can vary widely, however. Given that both processors are limited to six cores, AMD’s latest CPU isn’t giving you much of a lift in heavily-threaded applications.

Real talk on pricing

Pricing is an interesting point for the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 5 7600X. Going by list price, AMD actually reduced prices with its newer Zen 5 CPUs. The Ryzen 5 9600X comes in at $279, while the previous generation Ryzen 5 7600X launched at $299. Pricing at retailers is much different, however.

The Ryzen 5 9600X is holding at $279, and it should stay there for several months. It will drop in price as time goes on, especially if Intel’s upcoming Arrow Lake CPUs are competitive. But at least until the end of the year, the Ryzen 5 9600X will run you about $279.

Meanwhile, the Ryzen 5 7600X is only $197 at retailers right now, and you can pick up the Ryzen 5 7600 (non-X) for $182 without little to no difference in performance. That price shouldn’t go up, either. Although I don’t expect the Ryzen 5 7600X to significantly drop in price over the next few months, it certainly won’t go above $200. For context, the Ryzen 5 5600X, which is two generations back from the Ryzen 5 9600X, is currently selling for $135.

Thankfully, you only need to factor in the cost of the CPU with these two chips. Both use the AM5 socket, and they’ll both work with 600-series and the upcoming 700-series motherboards. You’ll also need a kit of DDR5 memory to use either CPU, though thankfully DDR5 prices have been steadily dropping over the last several months.

Productivity performance

The big boost with the Ryzen 5 9600X is single core performance, and you can see that in action immediately in Y-Cruncher. This app, which calculates a specified number of digits of Pi — I chose 500 million — gets about as close as you can to the “raw” performance of a CPU. It’s all math here. The Ryzen 5 9600X has a slight edge when it comes to multi-core performance, but it completed the calculation nearly twice as fast as the Ryzen 5 7600X if you look at a single core.

Few applications rely on a single core these days, so the performance in real applications isn’t as impressive. As you can see in Photoshop, the Ryzen 5 9600X claims a small lead of 7%. That’s a solid jump, but the the Ryzen 5 9600X is also around 40% more expensive. In this app, the performance improvement isn’t high enough to justify the cost.

Thankfully, that performance jump of between 5% and 10% translates into apps that stress a lot of cores. Handbrake is a good example of that, where the Ryzen 5 9600X was able to shave 8% off the transcoding time.

Similarly, in Blender, I saw an improvement of around 7% with the Ryzen 5 9600X over its last-gen counterpart.

There are cases where the Ryzen 5 9600X can be as much as 40% faster than the Ryzen 5 7600X, though those situations are few and far between. In most apps that are leveraging more than a single core, you’re looking at a jump of 10% at most and somewhere around 6% to 7% on average. If you aren’t concerned with gaming, the Ryzen 5 7600X simply offers more bang for your buck at the moment.

Gaming performance

CPUs like the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 5 7600X particularly shine when it comes to gaming, offering solid performance for a low price — assuming you don’t need a full eight cores. You might assume that the Ryzen 5 9600X runs away in games considering its solid single core performance lead, but that’s not always the case.

3DMark Time Spy sets the stage here, with the Ryzen 5 9600X offering an uninspiring 6% lead over the Ryzen 5 7600X. It’s important to note that this is the CPU score from 3DMark Time Spy, not the overall score. That should show the largest difference between these two CPUs, and even then, there’s only a minor increase.

Breaking out into real games, the Ryzen 5 9600X ranges anywhere from exceptional to disappointing. In Far Cry 6, it was a massive 20% faster than the Ryzen 5 7600X. But in Gears Tactics and Hitman 3, the performance improvements barely register. Similar to productivity performance, there’s no doubt that the Ryzen 5 9600X is faster. It’s just not enough faster to justify the price compared to the Ryzen 5 7600X.

There’s one exception, and that’s AVX-512. LeelaChessZero is an AI chess engine that leverages AVX-512 instructions, and the dedicated data path on the Ryzen 5 9600X leads to close to double the performance of the Ryzen 5 7600X. It’s a huge uplift. For gamers, this particularly applies to PS3 emulation, which makes liberal use of AVX-512 instructions.

Which budget CPU reigns supreme?

Right now, the Ryzen 5 7600X is tough to beat. Arriving somewhere around 5% and 10% faster, the Ryzen 5 9600X can’t justify being 40% more expensive. Considering both CPUs use the same platform, and they arrive with nearly identical specs, this comparison is an easy win for the Ryzen 5 7600X. It offers a much better value, at least at the time of writing.

Make sure to check up on pricing, however. As time goes on, the Ryzen 5 9600X will get cheaper, and it’s undoubtedly faster than the Ryzen 5 7600X. For my money, I would stick with the Ryzen 5 7600X as long as the Ryzen 5 9600X remains above $240. Once AMD’s latest drops below that price, it’s a much more attractive offer from a value standpoint.