AMD’s Mid-range Ryzen 5 4-core & 6-core Processors Hit Retail

Right on schedule, AMD has today released its first Ryzen 5 processors, targeted at those who are dying for the chance to own a Zen-based chip, but don’t want to open their wallets wide enough to let $329 slide out (especially with Vega coming out soon!).

As we covered a couple of weeks ago, Ryzen 5 chips are going to be available in both quad- and six-core varieties, and begins its pricing at $169 for the 1400, and peaks at $249 with the 1600X.

Here’s a taste of AMD’s current lineup:

As embarrassing as it is, this launch is happening before we managed to get our Ryzen 7 review up, but that will be rectified soon, with the Ryzen 5 review to follow in the days ahead. I’ll explain more in the Ryzen 7 review, but at launch, I decided to suck it up and overhaul our entire CPU suite, which resulted in all benchmarking being done “from scratch”. The result is a test suite that’s far better than the last one, but it brought with it the caveat of being so late.

Nonetheless, it’s a secret to no one at this point that Ryzen proves to be quite the good performer in many different workloads, so that should carry on over to Ryzen 5, as long as you don’t mind giving up some of your cores. Of all of the Ryzen 5 chips, the tastiest has got to be the 1600. It forgoes full-blown XFR support, but we’re dealing with a six-core chip at over 4GHz, and one that’s probably overclockable enough to reach 1600X heights. That’s a lot of value.

That all said, I’m keeping this short and sweet in order to jump right back on the writing for the (seriously overdue) Ryzen 7 look. Expect to see that soon, and a full Ryzen 5 look by the weekend.