With DDR5 still expensive, the budget PC world keeps pulling AM4 back off the shelf. This week delivered a new AM4 chip at retail and new firmware for boards old enough to be in fourth grade.
AMD’s two budget six-cores have finally reached US retail, just not at AMD’s prices. Amazon US lists the Ryzen 5 5500F at about $120 and the Ryzen 5 7500 at about $210 (confirm in the pricing widget below), both $20 above their $99 and $189 MSRPs. Both are sold directly by Amazon, and at the time of reporting Micro Center and Newegg had no listings.
The 5500F is more interesting than its name suggests. It’s a six-core, 12-thread Zen 3 part built on the Vermeer die rather than the older $90 Ryzen 5 5500’s Cezanne. That gives it PCIe 4.0 and a 4.4 GHz boost, versus PCIe 3.0 and 4.2 GHz on the 5500. The Ryzen 5 7500 is essentially a 7500F with integrated graphics enabled: six Zen 4 cores, DDR5, PCIe 5.0 and a 5 GHz boost at 65W.
ASUS released BIOS 6265 for the PRIME A320M-A at the end of August 2026, carrying AMD AGESA ComboV2 PI 1.2.0.12 and fixing fTPM vulnerabilities CVE-2026-6726 and CVE-2026-6727. GIGABYTE followed in early September with BIOS F59d for the GA-A320M-S2H on the same AGESA.
The 5500F’s selling points are PCIe 4.0 and staying on the DDR4 you already own. At $120, it sits $30 over the 5500 for a clock bump and a faster PCIe link. That’s worth it if you’re pairing it with a Gen4 NVMe drive or a newer x8 GPU that loses bandwidth on PCIe 3.0. It’s harder to justify for a basic esports box. Our MSI PRO B550M-P WiFi6E (2026) review shows what a modern budget AM4 board looks like if you’re building fresh rather than reviving an A320. The Ryzen 5 7500 at $210 is a tougher sell. That money is in 7600-class territory once sales hit, and it still needs DDR5.
A320 owners should check their board’s CPU support list before buying anything. A fresh AGESA doesn’t mean a bargain-bin VRM can feed every Zen 3 chip happily, and BitLocker users should suspend encryption before flashing an fTPM update.
Our advice: wait for Newegg and Micro Center listings before paying the Amazon premium. Launch markups like this usually fade once more retailers stock the part.
Discussion (12 replies)
Join Discussion →I mean pricing went hyperbolic after AM4 for not much performance gains...
Not really wrong there when it comes to gaming. Yeah, I like my AM5/9800X3D build which does have a PCIe 5.0 NVME drive and 6400 MT/s DDR5 and there are some improvements compared to my AM4/5800X3D setup w/ DDR4 3600 MT/s, even at 1440p/4K, but not enough for me jump up and down about.
However my bigger goal when I put the AM5 build together last spring was to beat the incoming rampocalypse and be ready for when AMD finally launches those 10/12 core CCD CPUs down the road.
Otherwise, AM4 has been awesome and it was actually my first AMD build in over a decade, done back when @Brent_Justice reviewed the 3700X.
I'd really like to do a look back at AM4, from Ryzen 1 to Ryzen 3, and see how it holds up with current GPUs and games. I think it would be highly interesting to take a look at that.
Let's hope AM5 can do the same. RUMOR (yeah i know), says Zen 7 will be on AM5 as well. If true, that would be 4 geenrations, not bad! We'll see.
I am 100% not holding my breath for any new tech that allows better I/O (PCIE lanes) or anything high bandwidth compute to trickle down to our market. ESPECIALLY since AMD has now broken through the 1 trillion dollar company barrier.
Credit where credit is due... Nvidia was 10-20x AMD's market cap just a few years ago... now it's more like 5x. And Intel... well... yea...
We the DIY community now get well and truly hosed by the rest of the industry. Until AI datacenter production slows... or stops or hopefully reverses... we won't see product targeted to us other than stuff that was made but doesn't pass muster for enterprise consumption. Then it will take 600 watts + of power and STILL cost 3+ thousand dollars for a single part.... Oh wait... DAMNIT!
NO but seriously.. board members and share holders will sue the ever loving crap out of companies that don't sell through to ALL of the enterprise sales they can get in the chase for moah Monay. And that is the problem with publicly traded companies. They are beholden to shareholders 100% of the time.
I guess everyone who didn't already switch to DDR5 last year will be holding on to DDR4 for the foreseeable future.
It will crash and burn epically. There are rumors, well more than rumors now, that they can't even turn on even half the GPUs they are hoarding. It either sits in warehouses, or installed but without power to turn them on, or maybe only exist as a committent. Oracle just invoked force majeure on its own datacenter builders because they can't actually use them. There are also rumors that nvidia is strong-arming them to buy all the GPUs now, otherwise they don't get GPUs in the future.
I like AI and all. Its been very useful recently, but I can't wait for the AI bubble to explode.
Given that I still have ddr3 systems in use, I'm not too worried about ddr4.
Don't flex your DDR3 on my DDR2 :LOL:
It might be coming.. Anthropic is delaying it's IPO.
Well of all of them I kind of hope Anthropic survives. I love me some Claude.