AMD’s Ryzen 5 9600X has traditionally been the most affordable entry point into Team Red’s latest generation of processors, which yielded modest gains in gaming performance over the 7600X but much larger gains in its efficiency to make it a more optimal choice. It’s usually been a deal when I’ve spotted it at £160-£180 in the past, although you can currently snag an ‘As New’ condition for £131 on Amazon with its Resale section (formerly the Amazon Warehouse). There was a deal running to get a new one for £135 earlier today, which went very quickly, and this is technically even cheaper than that was.

Will’s review of the 9600X for Eurogamer noted a decent generational uptick in performance for this chip over the older 7600X, with an 11 perdent boost in Flight Simulator 2020, a notorious title for CPU-bound performance, with a 1080p benchmark providing a 62.93fps average. This is actually also above the 8-core 7700X from last-gen, too. 2020 in our testing, with its 62.93fps average at 1080p sitting above the beefier 7700X, too. Margins were a little smaller in Hitman World of Assassination, with the 9600X having a near seven percent lead over its predecessor, and a 208.40fps result at 1080p that’s virtually identical to the 7700X, making this six core chip more powerful than you’d think!

The content creation results are a little more promising in Will’s review, with the 9600X delivering a 16 percent boost in single core speeds in Cinebench 2024 (this matters for the responsiveness in more general productivity loads), and an 11 percent jump in multi-threaded tasks (and this matters for strength in more intense tasks, such as gaming or content creation workloads). The single-core margin actually matches AMD’s own gains in IPC, or instructions per clock, for the newer Ryzen 9000 chips in their own benchmarking, meaning the 9600X has done well to meet AMD’s original claims of performance uptick. If it’s any further indication, it’s also one of our favourite gaming CPUs in a more affordable price range.

If you want to grab a capable, modern AMD CPU for a bargain price, this potent Amazon Resale deal on the Ryzen 5 9600X is a real surprise.