AMD Ryzen 5 5500 Processor

The AMD Ryzen 5 5500 brings 6 cores and 12 threads to the extreme budget segment on AM4 at just $129, making it one of the most affordable modern processors capable of competent gaming. Based on the Cezanne architecture with Zen 3 cores, it differs from the 5600 by having half the L3 cache, which can impact gaming performance by 5-10 percent in cache-sensitive titles. Despite this, it handles 1080p gaming well enough, driving budget GPUs like the RX 7600 and RTX 4060 without severe bottlenecking in most scenarios. The 6 cores manage everyday tasks and light multitasking adequately. Power consumption is very low, and the included cooler is sufficient. The AM4 platform on a B450 or B550 motherboard with DDR4 creates an incredibly affordable total system cost. Compared to Intel's Core i3-12100F, the 5500 offers more cores but lower per-core performance due to the reduced cache. For the tightest budgets possible, the Ryzen 5 5500 enables a functional gaming PC build at a remarkably low processor cost on AM4.