AMD’s Ryzen 5000 CPUs have been doing extremely well since launch. You can check the company’s Q4 earnings report, the stats from Mindfactory, or the latest figures from Steam’s Hardware Survey. They all say the same thing: AMD is killing it in the CPU market. The below chart from Amazon just says in one picture:
Out of the top-10 bestselling CPUs, Intel only has one in the top-5 and three overall. Out of these, only two are from the 10th Gen lineup, both being budget-range Core i5-class parts, namely the 10600K and the 10400. All the rest of the products are from across various generations of the Ryzen family. At #1, you’ve got the Ryzen 5 3600 (no surprise there), followed by the Ryzen 9 3900X and the 1st Gen Ryzen 5 1600. All these chips are selling at their SEP (recommended retail prices), give or take. However, the fifth-ranked Ryzen 5 5600X which is part of the latest Zen 3 desktop family is currently priced at $394, nearly $100 more than its MSRP of $299.
This just goes on to show how widespread and severe the present hardware shortages really are. Consumers are buying a hex-core processor for the price of an octa-core part, and this is a chip meant for budget-oriented users to boot. Moving down the ladder, we have the Ryzen 7 5800X at #8 going for $539. This is once again nearly $100 more than the MSRP of $449.
According to reports, the supply for the mid-range Ryzen 5000 CPUs should improve in the coming months, but the higher-end variants are expected to stay scarce and overpriced for the time being. Regardless, AMD has done a fairly good job of deterring scalpers. Compared to the NVIDIA RTX 30 series GPU, a much lower number of Zen 3 chips were scalped over at eBay and StockX.
