AMD’s Ryzen CPUs are getting cheaper as retailers jostle for sales

AMD pitched its Ryzen processors to be highly competitive against rival Intel offerings, and these CPUs are increasingly looking better value for money, as something of a price-cutting battle is going on between online retailers.

Some of the biggest discounts (percentage-wise) have been applied to the Ryzen 7 1700X, the second-best processor in the range – it’s an 8-core chip running at a base clock of 3.4GHz with Turbo to 3.8GHz, and is only eclipsed by the flagship 1800X (which boosts things up to 3.6GHz/4GHz).

As V3.co.uk spotted, the 1700X has been cut to £345 at Ebuyer, with Amazon undercutting that retailer at £344, and CCL Computers matching Amazon’s price. That’s down from the recommended retail price of £390, so represents a substantial saving of around 12%.

Buy the Ryzen 7 1700X from Amazon here

Some other retailers are bringing down the price of the 1700X to around the £350 mark. For example, Currys/PC World has the processor at £348, and Scan has it at £351.

So what about the beefy flagship Ryzen 7 1800X? The recommended price for this is £490, but you can now get it from Amazon for £429, and Overclockers UK has matched that – an impressive £61 saving. CCL has it at £430, just a smidgen more, but other retailers are more expensive, with Ebuyer asking £460, for example.

Buy the Ryzen 7 1800X from Overclockers UK here

As for the third-in-line Ryzen 7 1700, Ebuyer is actually the most competitive here, having this CPU priced at £287 (it has a recommended price of £320). Amazon is offering this model at £290.

Bargain basement

For the more budget-minded, AMD’s Ryzen 5 1500X has been cut to £174 at Scan and CCL. This chip is £180 at Ebuyer and Amazon.

All prices are correct as of the time of writing, but given the competitive jostling between these various online retailers, they may well change pretty swiftly.

It’s also interesting to recall that on launch, when there was a stock shortage, folks were paying £540 for a flagship Ryzen 7 1800X.

Of course, when the initial pricing was revealed, UK prices were disappointingly almost equivalent to dollar price tags, thanks to the slump in the pound relative to the US currency caused by the Brexit vote.

So you could argue that these price cuts are overdue in one way – although of course, prices in the US are coming down too. Apparently not by as much though, as Amazon.com has the flagship 1800X reduced from $499 to $465, a saving of $34 compared to Amazon UK’s current discount of £61.

Every little bit of extra value certainly helps, as does every extra bit of performance, and if you’re after the latter, check out our guide on how to overclock a Ryzen CPU.

AMD will soon be launching its next-generation Vega graphics cards – that should happen next month – and we’ll be keeping a keen eye on the pricing of those in comparison to Nvidia’s GPUs.