AMD’s new Ryzen 5 chips should to deliver bang for buck from 11 April

Did you find yourself reading our recent AMD Ryzen 7 review and hankering after something similar, but a little more wallet-friendly? AMD has your back, and we now have release dates and prices for the Ryzen 5 chips.

The Ryzen 5 chips share the Ryzen 7’s zen architecture but are aimed at a more mainstream audience. Four chips will be launching on 11 April, ranging between $250 (~£240) and $170 (~£160). All four chips will use the existing AM4 socket, leaving them compatible with the same motherboards as the R7s.

Here are your options. At the top of the range is the $250 R5 1600X, which has six cores and 12 threads, running at a base clock speed of 3.6GHz or overclocked at 4.0GHz. Next in line is the $220 (~£210) R5 1600, which has the same number of threads and cores, but a clock speed of 3.2GHz or 3.5GHz when overclocked.

The lower end of the Ryzen 5 scale is made up of two four-core and eight-thread numbers: the R5 1500X and R5 1400. The former is clocked at 3.5GHz (3.7GHz Turbo mode) with the latter 3.2GHz and 3.4GHz Turbo. They go for $190 (~£180) and $170 (~£160) respectively.

“Ryzen will ultimately bring innovation and competition to virtually every segment of the PC market, and Ryzen 5 is the next big step on that journey, designed to achieve new levels of compute performance for millions of PC users,” said Jim Anderson, senior vice president and general manager of AMD’s computing and graphics group. “AMD reinvigorated the high-performance desktop market with Ryzen 7 earlier this month, and AMD Ryzen 5 now brings the power and efficiency of the ‘Zen’ core to users in the highly popular sub-$300 segment of the market.”

Time will tell if he’s right and if the new Ryzen chips are as impressive as the R7s. While the £500 Ryzen 7 1800X was aiming at the top-end Intel i7 processors, the R5 series is aiming at the more affordable end. The £240 one is most likely competing against Intel’s Kaby Lake i5-7600K (RRP £230) and the R5 1400 is most likely squaring up against the i3-7350K, which goes for £170.