The stars are aligning for AMD's upcoming Ryzen CPU family, with the mid-range Ryzen 5 1600X to reportedly come in at a price of just $260 - featuring 6C/12T of CPU performance at 3.3GHz, and 3.7GHz under Boost - also with XFR pushing past 3.7GHz as the cooling scales (the better the cooling tech, like a Corsiar AIO unit - the higher XFR pushes the frequency).
Well, early benchmarks indicate that the Ryzen 5 1600X show that Cinebench R15 performance is very strong, with a score that its edging on Intel's Core i7-6800K, a CPU that costs $170 more at $430. It also offers performance that is only just shy of the Core i7-6850K, a chip that costs $617. This means AMD's new CPU is 138% cheaper, under half the cost - and remember, the motherboard savings will be $100-$150 easily.
The Ryzen 5 processors are the CPUs that will be the most disruptive to Intel, as AMD will be selling chips at under half the cost of the equivalent Intel - so gamers can now have even faster PCs, with a significant saving. This is money now spared up for the graphics card, so when Vega launches in a few months time - gamers will build an all-AMD gaming PC that will kick some serious ass, at what seems like a possibly big savings on the entire system.
Gamers saving $300-$500 from their new gaming PC thanks to AMD's amazing bang for buck Ryzen CPUs, not only are AMD back with performance in the CPU world thanks to huge improvements in IPC, and what seems like stellar multi-threaded performance, they're doing it while undercutting Intel's prices by a large chunk.
Intel's previous-gen Core i7-6700K is still faster, but it also costs a lot more - furthermore, the new Kaby Lake-based Core i7-7700K costs $350 right now - with a good board from GIGABYTE or ASUS going for $200+, with $550-$650 being the CPU/motherboard cost in total. Compare this to the $260 processor, and a $120-$150 board, you're going to pick those up for $400. A good $150-$200 discount from the Intel combo, at a minimum.
The next few weeks are going to be some of the most exciting time in over 10 years for PC enthusiasts, gamers - and the entire market at a whole. AMD are ramping directly into competing with Intel in a big way with new CPUs, but we also have the next-gen Vega GPUs coming in a few months. AMD is unleashing the first consumer graphics card with HBM2 technology, mixed with the high-end Vega GPU that brings a lot of new things to the table - especially High Bandwidth Cache (HBC).
AMD is going to have the best year in over 10 years, mark these words. Well, not with a highlighter - but, you know - with your mind.