AMD’s new Ryzen desktop processors are seeing early price cuts across the board in the days after launch with over seven percent slashed off pricing in a bid to promote sales of the new range that didn’t receive particularly glowing reviews.
Launched earlier this month with the Ryzen 9 9900X and 9950X as recently as 14th August, performance was up on their predecessors as well as having lower launch prices, and lower power draw in multi-threaded applications. The new 9000-series CPUs with their Zen 5 architecture struggled to offer the significant gains we’ve seen in the past from AMD and were much slower in some games than its game-focussed 3D V-Cache titles.
As a result, performance didn’t warrant an upgrade from the previous generation, many of which were better value given they’d had price cuts recently. Unsurprisingly, this has translated in to poor initial sales and in Germany at least, where there are a large number of retailers, competition for those early sales has resulted in prices already falling.
Usually, we don’t see price drops with new CPUs till well into their launch cycle, often not till the last few months before the next generation is launched. However, websites Hardware & Co, Videocardz noticed that pricing in Germany was already being discounted from launch day prices compared to those given to German reviewers in Euros.
For example, the Ryzen 9 9900X should be retailing for 539 EUR, but instead was readily shown on price comparison websites as low as 499 EUR. That’s equivalent to over seven percent lower than launch pricing. It’s clearly the middle two processors that retailers were most concerned about shifting, as the Ryzen 7 9700X was the next biggest drop at 379 EUR compared to a 399 EUR launch price or around five percent.
The flagship Ryzen 9 9950X was spotted for just 699 EUR with a launch price of 709 EUR and finally the cheapest Ryzen 9000 CPU – the Ryzen 5 9600X, was seen for 299 EUR rather than it’s launch price of 309 EUR. Other countries in the region haven’t been as lucky. The UK for example is seeing prices in line with those a launch and the US hasn’t seen any significant price cuts so far.
There are rumored fixes for the Ryzen 9000 processors too, which have been subject to a performance-hurting bug in Windows while AMD itself may even be introducing a BIOS update, increasing the power limits of some Ryzen 9000 CPUs to further increase performance. The Ryzen 9000 series was always going to be a tough sell with Ryzen 7000 pricing having come down significantly in some case, while Ryzen 7000 3D V-Cache models outperformed the Ryzen 9000 series in most games.
We’re also expecting a Ryzen 9000-series range of 3D V-Cache models in the next few months which could further consign the initial Ryzen 9000 CPUs to the general purpose pile of CPUs you should probably avoid if you’re building a PC for gaming.
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