- AMD’s Ryzen 5 Zen 4 prices jumped from $200 to $400 without warning
- The chart of average prices shows a sharp sustained rise beginning in February 2026
- Stock changes and supply constraints could explain the increase
Anyone tracking PCPartPicker‘s price lists may have noticed a sudden upward spike in the average price of AMD’s Ryzen 5 series.
For more than a year, the selling price of models like the Ryzen 5 7600X and 9600X ranged between $170 and $220. That changed at the beginning of February 2026, when the average price suddenly shot up to $400 and stayed there.
The chart does not show a gradual upward trend, but rather a sudden jump. One week the chip was a reliable midrange option, the next it cost almost twice as much.
Memory crisis inevitably a factor
There hasn’t been a public statement from AMD outlining a formal price change, so it’s likely due to a mix of supply pressures and shifting priorities across the semiconductor market.
One factor, to absolutely no one’s surprise, is memory. Major manufacturers, including Samsung and Micron, have shifted manufacturing capacity toward HBM and enterprise DDR5 to serve AI data centers.
This has pushed consumer prices of DRAM up massively year over year. As memory costs rose, distributors and retailers appear to have adjusted CPU prices to protect margins across entire system builds.
Production capacity is another piece of the puzzle. Ryzen 5 chips share advanced processing nodes at TSMC with high-margin AI accelerators.
When wafer supply tightens, higher-priced silicon tends to gain priority. Retail inventory at major online stores is thinning, leaving more listings in the hands of third-party sellers, where prices are rising quickly.
Even older AM4 Ryzen 5 parts have seen price pressure. With DDR5 kits reaching around $350 in some cases, some builders have switched back to DDR4 platforms, straining the remaining AM4 inventory.
The scale of the price increase is impossible to miss. Ten or twenty percent swings are common in the DIY market, but a sustained doubling for a regular CPU is more than a little unusual.
So far, the price chart shows a market out of balance. A processor that long defined the $200 sweet spot now hovers around $400, leaving buyers to weigh their options.
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