At a stupid price
AMD’s Ryzen 5 3500X, which has only been sold in China, is whipped up at a ridiculous price as a retail chip at several American online stores.
On Amazon, you can find the 3500X for $ 219.99 and Newegg.com sells for $ 173.99.
The price of the Amazon, $ 219.99, makes a more competitive mid-range processor from Intel Comet Lake and Rocket Lake look good. In fact, some of the best mid-range CPUs like Intel’s Core i5-10600K have the same price. Damn, you can pick up Intel’s Core i5-11400 and 11400F which you can find for $ 180. We never thought we would see the day when Chipzilla could beat AMD for a price above specs.
To make matters worse, the cheapest AMD 3500X CPU to buy like the Ryzen 3 3300X and the 3100 is as rare as chicken teeth.
Not that it’s a bad chip. It has six Zen 2 cores, 32 MB of L3 cache and a base frequency of 3.6 GHz base and 4.1 GHz.
But really, the only way to justify that price is if you grab the chip under the hood of a cheap B450 motherboard. Intel’s B460 motherboards are worth $ 10 to $ 20 more than a B450 motherboard with a similar specification, so you don’t really save much.
It looks like AMD could have made a goal of its own here, as most reviews of the Ryzen 5 3500X were good. It is likely that the shortage of chips has just increased the price.