- AMD’s Ryzen 5 Zen 4 prices jumped from $200 to $400 without warning
- The average price graph shows a sharp and sustained increase from February 2026.
- Stock movements and supply constraints could explain this increase
Anyone follows PCPartPicker‘AMD’s pricing charts may have noticed a sudden rise in the average price of AMD’s Ryzen 5 series.
For more than a year, the sale price of models such as the Ryzen 5 7600X and 9600X was between $170 and $220. That changed in early February 2026, when the average price suddenly shot up to $400 and stayed there.
The graph does not show a gradual upward trend but rather a sudden jump. One week the chip was a reliable mid-range option, the next week it cost almost twice as much.
The memory crisis is inevitably a factor
There has been no public statement from AMD outlining a formal price change, so this is likely due to a mix of supply pressure and changing priorities in the semiconductor market.
One factor, to the absolute surprise of no one, is memory. Major manufacturers, including Samsung and Micron, have shifted production capacity to HBM and enterprise DDR5 to serve AI data centers.
This has caused consumer DRAM prices to rise massively year over year. As memory costs increased, distributors and retailers appear to have adjusted processor prices to protect their margins on full system releases.
Production capacity is another piece of the puzzle. Ryzen 5 chips share advanced process nodes at TSMC with high-margin AI accelerators.
When wafer supply tightens, more expensive silicon tends to take priority. Retail inventory at major online stores is dwindling, leaving more listings in the hands of third-party sellers, where prices rise quickly.
Even older AM4 Ryzen 5 parts have faced pricing pressure. With DDR5 kits reaching around $350 in some cases, some builders have moved back to DDR4 platforms, putting a strain on remaining AM4 inventory.
The scale of the price rise is impossible to ignore. Variations of ten or twenty percent are common in the DIY market, but a sustained doubling for a consumer processor is more than a little unusual.
For now, the price chart shows an unbalanced market. A processor that has long defined the $200 sweet spot now sits at around $400, leaving buyers to weigh their options.
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