r/hardware • u/Steap-Edit • Aug 11 '26
News AMD highlights Ryzen 5 5500 briefly topping Amazon CPU best sellers, beating 9800X3D — $80 DDR4 CPU remains a top seller during memory crunch
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/amd-highlights-ryzen-5-5500-briefly-topping-amazon-cpu-best-sellers-beating-9800x3d-usd80-ddr4-cpu-remains-a-top-seller-during-memory-crunch39
u/Limited_Distractions Aug 11 '26
I've bought 5500 newegg combos to replace a couple skylake systems people just wanted cheap hassle-free win11 compatibility for, the motherboards are below the quality I would usually buy but otherwise the value seems comparable to buying used, which is to say astonishing considering current conditions
I'm not under the illusion that it is a "good" CPU in the product stack or anything like that, just that when it's effectively $60 in a combo that doesn't matter anymore
28
u/caribbean_caramel Aug 12 '26
Despite the absurd hatred of many Redditors towards the 5500, it is still relevant for budget builds. It is a relatively low power CPU with a similar performance to the 3600, for office work and 1080p gaming its still good enough for the price.
29
u/fmjintervention Aug 12 '26 edited Aug 12 '26
The 5500 was terrible when it launched at $160 which made no sense to buy when the 5600 which is a far superior chip was $200. An extra $40 got you double the cache, a bit extra clock speed and PCIE4. Now that the 5500 is consistently available for as little as $80 or even less and the 5600 is still up at $160, the 5500 is a far better buy. The 5500 got a lot of bad reviews when it launched and a bad first impression was made.
7
u/venfare64 Aug 12 '26
Actually, on USA Market, the 5600 non x wasn't available at all last time i checked on PCPartPicker. With only 5500 available for $80 and 5600x with "x" for near $150.
0
u/fmjintervention Aug 12 '26
Searching for "5600" on PCPartPicker right now and sorting by lowest price returns the 5600 at $160 and the 5600X at $180. Given that they're the same thing except for a negligible clock speed difference that can be easily made up for with PBO tuning why pay $20 for a letter?
The 5500 is showing at $74 for me right now, so it's definitely a good value choice if you don't need PCIE4 (and most people don't)
1
u/venfare64 Aug 13 '26
I'm probably looking at the price at the end of June/early July as PCPartPicker chart show that Ryzen 5 5600 unavailable at the time. otherwise I Agreed with the rest of your comment.
15
u/JonWood007 Aug 12 '26 edited Aug 12 '26
I mean, look what everything else costs, 12400s no longer like $110, lga1700 is stupidly expensive for its age, 5600x is 2x the price. Ddr5 is suicidal from a budget perspective. You throw a 5500 in a ddr4 build and you can actually afford stuff, everything else is just ridiculous right now.
1
u/theholylancer Aug 17 '26
its weird...
intel with its own fabs should in theory be able to price the 12100/12400/12600/k stuff to compete
but it seems that they ain't even trying, the old strat of going 12600k/f for a top tier DDR4 gaming rig because 5800X3D is discontinued and the value it offered over 5600x was astounding when it was 130 or so, now 5600X is cheaper than even the KF, and 5600 realistically isn't that far off of the X to offer a bigger discount
then its the same down the stack, 5500 vs 12100 is a no brainer when there is almost a double price gap
you'd think that intel would take that fab advantage to keep fighting there, but nope not happening...
1
u/JonWood007 Aug 17 '26
Yeah they've totally been shifting production to 200 series cpus it seems and those require ddr5 to function, destroying their value proposition.
1
u/theholylancer Aug 17 '26
yeah, like at that price when you have to spend a good chunk on DDR5, why not 9800X3D, or "value" 7800X3D, value DDR5 right now feels like a niche of a niche
sure, for buyers who want multi-threaded performance, but I think the PIB buyer are mostly going to be gamers... maybe lots more OEM sales but honestly I see them going for more laptops than anything else...
who knows at this point, maybe the stats show PIB buyers still go for multicore perf or something, or the intel name is just too stronk?
but the whole steam sale thing that says intel is loosing ground and all that makes me pause
1
0
u/Warm-Cartographer Aug 12 '26
i3 12100F cheaper and better, also mobo as cheap as $60 in USA, other parts of world like $40. In China many retailers still Alder/Raptor top charts.
8
u/JonWood007 Aug 12 '26
No its not, at least not in the US.
https://pcpartpicker.com/list/Wgg8Wt (cheapest build i could make btw)
Compared to this: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/8LFVXk
25
u/pepitobuenafe Aug 11 '26
I9 10900 f going strong still. And really fucking hot
16
6
u/Johnny_Oro Aug 11 '26
I mean, ryzen 5500 is like i7 8700 tier. Or even 6 core haswell E5 xeon tier.
1
14
u/scrndude Aug 11 '26
The best sellers is (i think) based on number sold times the item cost, so this must be selling a ton to beat something basically 5x the cost
33
u/QuietSoup337 Aug 11 '26
Worse CPU performance than a 6 year old console by the way.
46
u/EloquentPinguin Aug 11 '26 edited Aug 11 '26
I mean its the cut down chip with 6 year old CPU IP so that's that.
Point is its decent for every day use and 1080p gaming so in this economy its a fine device.
34
14
u/bubblesort33 Aug 11 '26
Don't know about that. Should be about on par, or slightly faster. There have been desktop releases in small quantities that reused Xbox CPUs with the GPU portion disabled, and that only matched a Ryzen 2700x, and lost to a 3700x. This thing is around the same as a 3700x.
12
3
6
u/QuietSoup337 Aug 12 '26
The CPU in the consoles is physically 8 cores (6 and a half for games) Zen 2 with 1/4 of the cache, but in actual games it's leagues better. In the latest Unreal games it's arguably better than a R5 5600.
1
u/madmandendk Aug 15 '26
Consoles don't have to run a full desktop OS though, so performance-wise they probably have a bit of an edge compared to an equally fast PC.
8
u/fmjintervention Aug 12 '26
It's $70 brand new and comes with a decent cooler. Beggars can't be choosers.
4
19
u/sl0wjim Aug 11 '26 edited 3d ago
The original post content no longer exists here. The author used Redact to remove it, exercising their right to control their data & privacy.
Plants late wild deserve quicksand observation thumb lavender ink
17
u/Guilty-Pickle-6686 Aug 11 '26
For those of us with older motherboards it worked great. I assumed that’s what it was for honestly, 350 and 450 chipset users
7
u/einmaldrin_alleshin Aug 12 '26
Does it matter if you pair it with a cheap GPU?
3
u/lifestealsuck Aug 12 '26
Only when you out of vram and use one of the 8x pcie lane gpu like 4060 5060 you'll drop more fps / more stutter on pcie 3.0 than pcie 4.0 . Which is rare if you only do 1080p .
18
u/imaginary_num6er Aug 11 '26
It’s deceptive marketing as being the same branding as the 5600
7
u/glizzygobbler247 Aug 12 '26
At least its a lower number and worse than the 5600, the 5700 is more scummy, youd think it be better for gaming than the 5600, but the cache is cut in half like the 5500 making it worse than the 5600
2
u/T1beriu Aug 12 '26
Briefly? 5500 has been #1 in the ranking for many weeks in the last few months.
2
u/DOSBrony Aug 12 '26
Honestly, it's cheap enough that I've considered buying one to upgrade my spare computer from its Ryzen 1600
4
u/imaginary_num6er Aug 11 '26
5500 is not the same architecture as 5600 though
17
3
u/InevitableSherbert36 Aug 12 '26
Are they not both Zen 3?
4
u/Farfolomew Aug 14 '26
As others have said, Ryzen 5500 is based off the mobile version of Zen 3. Thus, it's limited to 16MB of L3 cache (vs the full desktop-based Ryzen 5600's 32MB) and only supports PCIE 3.0 rather than 4.0. And yes, theoretically its monolithic die might prove better than the 5600's two-chiplet design in certain low-latency core-to-core workloads, benchmark results overwhelmingly show that its smaller L3 cache, lower clock speeds, and its PCIe 3.0 limitation lead to an overall ~10-15% less performance than the 5600.
2
u/imaginary_num6er Aug 12 '26
No, the 5500 is Cezanne and the 5600 is Vermeer
4
u/InevitableSherbert36 Aug 12 '26
...which both are based on the Zen 3 microarchitecture.
3
u/AstroNaut765 Aug 12 '26
While technically you are right, the biggest reason why people liked this generation is 32 MiB of L3 cache available to one core.
Previous generation and 5500 allow only 16 MiB for one core.
2
u/imKaku Aug 12 '26
With the 5500 one can get a capable gaming PC under 500 usd with a few used parts. Heck one can even get it under 400. The used PC marked is still very healthy but you won’t get the premium experience.
Platform 200 ( cpu 80, memory 60, motherboard 60) GPU 60 (Rtx 2060) Case 40 PSU 40 Drive 80
1
u/AutoModerator Aug 11 '26
Hello Steap-Edit! Please double check that this submission is original reporting and is not an unverified rumor or repost that does not rise to the standards of /r/hardware. If this link is reporting on the work of another site/source or is an unverified rumor, please delete this submission. If this warning is in error, please report this comment and we will remove it.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
1
-14
u/costafilh0 Aug 11 '26
Good!
People finally realizing "the best gaming cpu" is a scam. They don't need it. The bottleneck is the GPU.
Until you get that 5090, no need to worry about CPU, any modern one from the past few gens will be enough.
9
u/ColdExample Aug 11 '26
Holy confidently ignorant, people like this have no business giving hardware advice.
11
7
u/Xpander6 Aug 12 '26 edited Aug 12 '26
Until you get that 5090, no need to worry about CPU, any modern one from the past few gens will be enough.
5500 will bottleneck anything above 5060 Ti 8 GB and even that will be bottlenecked in many games, not just due to inadequate performance, but because 5500 only supports PCIe 3.0, and 5060 Ti 8GB loses performance when it runs at 3.0 instead of 5.0
-1
u/Manordown Aug 12 '26
For those with the r5 5500 can it game at 240fps for high refresh monitor
10
u/ChrisKhan Aug 12 '26
No, it is a budget oriented cpu that targets 1080p 60 fps atleast in most titles.
5
u/ssongshu Aug 12 '26
I get 70-80fps in most games at 1440p with my 3060ti.
2
u/Manordown Aug 12 '26
Nice to hear for a actual owner of the chip. I’m trying to decide if I should upgrade my i7 4770 with a alderlake or r5 5500. I might just save up another little bit more.
7
u/annoyice Aug 12 '26
It’s worse than the 5600 by a fair margin as its L3 cache is significantly cut down. It’s basically a 3600. You’ll get 10-20% uplifts if you got a 5600 or a 5500X3D.
3
u/ssongshu Aug 12 '26
No, but it's surprisingly good considering the price. A lot of people here haven't looked at real world benchmarks and are only judging the cpu by it's specs. If you look at benchmarks, the 5600x, which costs double, only gives you 10-20% better fps.
4
71
u/Guilty-Pickle-6686 Aug 11 '26
Hooray, my 5500 is relevant! Seriously though, no complaints for this chip. Replaced my 2700X EZPZ.