AMD's excellent Ryzen 5 5600X has dropped to ?100 for Black Friday
A solid CPU for less.
AMD'S Ryzen 5 5600X is the slightly older and faster brother to our pick of the best budget AMD gaming CPU, the 5600, coming with a slightly higher clock speed and generally excellent performance for a modest outlay in 2024. From Scan Computers for Black Friday, they've given it a handy discount to drop its price down to £100 - that's pretty good going with its stock cooler.
With the 5600X, you're getting a capable 6 core and 12 thread processor that should be more than up to the task of both general computing, as well as more intensive workloads such as gaming and content creation. It's got a boost clock of up to 4.7GHz, and can perform well even with slightly slower DDR4 RAM than the performance/price sweet spot of 3200MT/s without much of a performance penalty.
The fact also remains is that the 5600X marks out an excellent jumping off point into the great value world that is AMD's AM4 ecosystem, as I discussed with my potential £750 Black Friday PC build. While AM5 still features reasonably high barriers to entry including grabbing rather costly DDR5 RAM as well as some of the more expensive AM5-capable motherboards. By comparison, the AM4 ecosystem is awash with high-spec X570 and B550 motherboards that won't cost you too much. It's worth noting also that DDR4 RAM has dropped like a stone in price too, making an important component a fair bit cheaper than before. It's also worth noting that PCIe 4.0-capable NVMe SSDs are back down in price compared to some higher prices earlier this year, and you've got an upgrade path to the likes of the 5900X, or 5700X3D for optimal gaming performance. This all combines to mean that it's not too expensive to get the building blocks of a more than capable PC built on AM4 these days, while having a capable processor at its core.
If you are in the market for an amazing value CPU for a lot less, this Black Friday deal on the Ryzen 5 5600X is not to be missed.