This Ryzen CPU is on sale for $76, and it's all you need for an ultra-budget gaming rig

It’s easy to get lost in costly flagship gaming CPUs like the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, but if you’re willing to dig a bit deeper, you can find a solid gaming CPU for significantly less. That’s the case with the Ryzen 5 5500, which is on sale as part of Amazon’s Spring Sale for just $76 — a 52% discount compared to its normal list price of $159. And, unlike more recent Ryzen CPUs, the Ryzen 5 5500 comes with a stock CPU cooler, so you can pick it up and slap it into an ultra-budget gaming rig without shelling out for a CPU cooler.

Why the Ryzen 5 5500 is perfect for a budget gaming PC

I won’t pretend the Ryzen 5 5500 can hold a candle to chunky flagships like the Core i9-12900K — which is also part of Amazon’s Spring Sale — but it’s a solid option considering how inexpensive the chip is right now. It’s a six-core chip with 12 threads, and it’s based on AMD’s Zen 3 architecture. Out of the box, the CPU can boost up to 4.2GHz, but it’s unlocked for overclocking, so you can push it further. There’s a decent amount of headroom, too, considering the chip only has a TDP of 65 watts.

The closest point of reference is AMD’s wildly popular Ryzen 5 5600X, which is also a six-core chip based on the Zen 3 architecture. There are a few notable differences with the Ryzen 5 5500, however. It has slightly lower maximum boost clock speeds, and it only comes with 16MB of L3 cache — the Ryzen 5 5600X has 32MB. The most important difference is PCIe support, however. Unlike most Zen 3 CPUs, the Ryzen 5 5500 only supports up to PCIe 3.0.

There are some cases where that could pose an issue, but it shouldn’t be a problem with graphics cards that use 8 or more PCIe lanes. The more practical slowdown comes in storage, but even a PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSD is leagues faster than a SATA SSD, and orders of magnitude faster than a spinning hard drive.

For a budget gaming rig, this chip makes a lot of sense. Not only is the CPU itself only $76 — and it comes with a bundled cooler — but it also uses an older socket. AM4 motherboards are dirt cheap, as is DDR4 memory. You can get a kit of 2x8GB DDR4-3200 memory for around $25 right now. Throw a solid budget GPU into the mix like the Arc A750 — which is also on sale for $190 — and you can get a full rig built for around $500. That’s unheard of in 2025.

• 

  AMD Ryzen 5 5500
  

  $76 $159 Save
  $83

  The Ryzen 5 5500 is a low-end AMD CPU that has six cores, 12 threads, and 16MB of L3 cache, half that of its higher-end but more expensive counterpart, the Ryzen 5 5600.

• 

  ASRock Intel ARC A750 Challenger D