The cost of buying into the latest AMD Zen 5 ecosystem looks like it’s about to drop, as rumors are circulating about a new budget AMD Ryzen gaming CPU launching very soon. The new AMD Ryzen 5 9600 looks set to sport six cores and 12 threads, and undercut the price of the current entry-level Zen 5 chip, the 9600X.
Assuming AMD gets the pricing right, this new chip could end up being the best gaming CPU for budget buyers. Given that the last-gen Ryzen 5 7600X now regularly goes for just $199, we’re hoping that this new CPU will be priced similarly, providing a solid entry-level chip that doesn’t cost a silly amount of money.
AMD has launched non-X versions of its CPUs plenty of times before, usually a few months after the first CPUs are released, so this launch isn’t a major surprise. Unlike Intel’s K-series CPUs, which are the only Intel chips with unlocked multipliers for overclocking, AMD usually keeps the multipliers unlocked even on its non-X chips, meaning you may well be able to run this chip at the same clock speed as the full-fat Ryzen 5 9600X, but without the extra cost.
This rumor comes from regular AMD tech leaker Hoang Anh Phu, who simply stated “R5 9600 Late Jan” in a post on X (formerly Twitter). Hoang Anh Phu is then asked if the chip will be 65W, to which the response is “I don’t think there will be a change in TDP for R5 non-X models.”
Previous six-core non-X AMD Ryzen CPUs, such as the Ryzen 5 7600, have historically had lower TDPs than their X-branded counterparts, but AMD reset expectations for this difference when it launched the Ryzen 5 9600X with a 65W TDP earlier this year, with later motherboard updates lifting the TDP to improve performance.
When pressed for more details about whether the new CPU will have lower clock speeds, Hoang Anh Phu confesses that they “don’t have more details” at the moment, but suggests that the CPU is likely to come with a Wraith CPU cooler included in its box, unlike the 9600X, pointing to an early leak of the 9600X box that implied it came bundled with a cooler.
Of course, none of this has been officially confirmed by AMD, so take it with a grain of salt for the moment, but we’d be very surprised if there isn’t a Ryzen 5 9600 in the works, based on previous AMD releases, and a January release for a new budget CPU would be very welcome. Hoang Anh Phu has also proved reliable on AMD CPU leaks in the past, correctly stating that the 9800X3D would cost $30 more than the 7800X3D at launch, for example.
In addition, there are also rumors that a Ryzen 5 9600X3D chip is in the works, which would be even better for gaming, thanks to 3D V-cache, but it’s also likely to be more expensive. In the meantime, check out our Ryzen 7 9800X3D review to see why this eight-core chip is our current favorite if you want to build a gaming PC right now.