Come on, AMD, where the hell are your budget X3D chips? Actually, scrap that - where are the Ryzen 3 series, or even the 5 series? I know those aren't exactly super-exciting top-tier product lines, brimming with insane Cinebench numbers or slightly higher frame rates than the competition in whatever the most popular game of the month is, but they're products that we seriously need as a community - if for no reason but the health of this beautiful PC-building hobby of ours.
What's worse is, by all accounts, (certainly for the 3 series) it's a segment that's been missing in the custom PC space since the rather excellent Ryzen 3 3300X way back in 2020. And with that, I'm talking about a full-fat design, complete with all of its PCIe lanes, and more. No G-series chips standing in pretending to be something it's not, aimed at eSports gamers.
Without champions at the budget end of the spectrum - the Core i3s, the Ryzen 3s - the average cost of a good rig is only going to steadily increase. Not only does this effectively gatekeep our hobby, one that was once readily accessible to anyone looking to save a bit of cash, but it also encourages companies to push prices higher. Motherboards, RAM, SSDs, PSUs, cases, you name it. It introduces this weird, almost pseudo-elitism to it all. Sorry, you and your family don't have the financial clout to be PC gamers anymore. Perhaps you should try looking at becoming more socially mobile instead.
I get it; PCs are expensive things. As our transistor size shrinks, processors become increasingly difficult and more expensive to fabricate. But I got into this space because my house got struck by lightning when I was young. It fried a rig, and my dad decided to replace the damaged parts rather than buy a whole new system. It wasn't exactly easy, but it was cheaper, and soon enough he discovered he could build his own PCs and get better value for a pittance, and it was fun. I soon followed in his footsteps, and 25 years later here I am. Trying to do that today with the latest hardware, though? Not a chance. You'd have to buy, at minimum, a new motherboard and CPU combo for at least $500.
Stagflation Disaster
Inflation and stagnation haven't helped this whole situation either. Late last year, I wrote an article about this and the rising cost of PC gaming, and the numbers still hold true in 2025. In the last decade, we've seen general inflation climb by around 40%. Wherever you are in the Western world, on average, household income has increased by less than half that. That puts a major strain on budgets and further pushes building custom PCs outside of the reach of many many people. And that's before the US's general purpose and directed tariffs come into play later this year.
Over the years I've watched as builds have become more expensive. Yes, this is in part because the wider industry has introduced ridiculous RGB lighting, and cooling, and gaming chairs, and mechanical keyboards, and more advanced cases, but there's been a slow creep upward in terms of those core products too. Prices have continued upwards at a tedious but consistent rate, $20 here, $40 there, particularly for CPUs and motherboards, generation after generation.
In fact, it's such an accepted thing in our industry that we praise manufacturers when they keep the recommended retail pricing the same as last year's model. Or at least when they announce a product launching like that, only for it to increase by $200 at retail due to stock demand. The problem is, we don't go: "Hang on a minute, how do you have the ROI to manage that to begin with?" Instead, we go: "Awh, how kind? They understand the current inflationary pressures and are giving us a deal".
But I digress. We don't have a full-fat Ryzen 3 chip in the 9000 series, and it's not looking likely that we'll get one either. The cheapest Team Red CPU you can currently buy is $245, and that's the 9600X, with the 9600 nowhere in sight after six months. That's not helpful. We need processors that are cheaper, more accessible, and that don't trim back features to encourage you to buy upwards into a chip that you don't actually need.
I always thought it was graphics cards that were the major problem in this field, that the RTX 4060 cost way more than its GTX 660 counterpart back in the day - but ironically those prices have dropped with inflation, and Nvidia continues to support the low-end. Combine that with Intel, now aggressively pursuing that market as well with its Arc GPUs, and it almost feels like that graphics sector is sincerely masking a lot of those price hikes from other categories.
Just imagine it, though. A Ryzen 3 9300X. Four cores, eight threads, 3.5 GHz base clock, 5.0 GHz boost, 32MB of cache, and a 65W TDP, all for $150. Full compliment of 28 PCIe 5.0 lanes, compatibility with all the chipsets, heck, you could lop off the iGPU to save manufacturing costs if you really wanted. What a dream that would be - but one that sadly, remains just that: a dream.
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