While AMD’s Ryzen 7000 series of Zen 4 CPUs on the AM5 chipset represent the latest and greatest that Team Red has to offer DIY PC builders, you shouldn’t feel rushed to upgrade if you’ve got an AM4 motherboard ready to go. That’s because last-gen Ryzen 5000 series chips still offer great performance, and thanks to this limited-time Black Friday discount, you can get one of the best ones — the Ryzen 9 5900X — for only $288.99 at Amazon. That’s a whopping 49% off its usual $569.99 price, making this an absolutely stellar deal.
More great Black Friday deals
Old but gold: The perfect upgrade for AM4 users
While AM5 motherboards and DDR5 RAM are a lot less expensive than they used to be, not everyone is ready or able to move away from a chipset they’ve been using for the last five generations of AMD Ryzen CPUs. For folks still using AM4 — either by choice or out of necessity — picking up a Ryzen 9 5900X for $289 would be an amazing upgrade. And even if you’re using a particularly old board like something from the 300-series, all you’d need to get it up and running is a quick BIOS update.
Released in 2020, the Ryzen 9 5900X is one of the top CPUs from the Zen 3 generation; it was surpassed only by the mighty Ryzen 9 5950X. With 12 cores, 24 threads, a 3.7GHz base clock, a 4.8GHz boost clock, and 64MB of L3 cache, it’s an excellent CPU for anyone in need of strong performance for both gaming and productivity workloads.
The processor is PCIe 4.0 and works with DDR4 RAM (you’d need AM5 to use newer DDR5 modules). Though the base memory clock speed it supports is 3200MHz, you can push that higher with some overclocking.
Performance-wise, the Ryzen 9 5900X is roughly on par with Intel’s 13th Gen Core i5-13600K, and with this Black Friday deal, it also costs just about as much as one, too. That’s some incredible value you should seriously consider taking advantage of if you’re still on AM4, especially if you’ve currently got an aging chip from older generations like the Ryzen 3000 series.
Something to keep in mind is that while this is the best AM4 CPU deal available right now overall, folks strictly interested in gaming performance should look to the Ryzen 7 5800X3D. It surpasses the 5900X in that regard thanks to its 3D V-Cache, though falls behind on productivity due to the loss of four cores and eight threads. It’s on sale for a near-identical price of $290 at Amazon (was $322.72), so ultimately, the processor you choose should be dependent on what you want out of your rig.
