Is AM5 still too expensive?

 When Ryzen 7000 series was released, it made clear that they're the new top dogs. Even the cheapest of the bunch(Ryzen 5 7600) was trading blows with i7 and i9 of that time in gaming. So unless you had some specific use case for those extra cores of i7 and i9, there was no point spending more on those processors for a gaming PC. 

BUT, the new AM5 platform had the Achille's heel of any new tech product; the cost of new technology. While a Core i7 and i9 were more expensive, they were available with DDR4 support, making the entire platform cost in less favour of AM5. The cost of early AM5 motherboards didn't make it any better for AMD.

For context, cheapest AM5 motherboards in India were ₹17-18k at launch and decent "AMD recommended" DDR5 RAM(6000MHz) kits were in the neighbourhood of 20k. Making the cost of a Ryzen 5 7600X platform about ₹45-50k. You could've gotten a i5-13600K with 32GB DDR4 and a "decent enough" motherboard for that price. While a Ryzen 5 7600X was still about 5% faster overall in gaming, that difference was too low to notice without counting frames, specially with budget-midrange GPUs due to CPU-GPU scaling. 

So every tech influencer started saying: "If you want to future proof your platform, go with AM5 and if you want best value for your money, get Intel or even Ryzen 5000 series."

Now fast forward to almost 2(1 year 9 months to be exact) year now and let's see if this statement is still true. 

AM5 motherboards are a lot cheaper now and the prices of the processors themselves are gone down in price a bit. You can consistently find DDR5 kits with CL36 or lower around ₹10-12k range, which is a lot more affordable. But DDR4 is still a tad bit cheaper. Now AM5 motherboards are a lot more affordable too, you can readily find decent B650 motherboards for ₹11-15k(same as price of decent B550 motherboards before AM5), but just as the case of DDR4 RAM, B550 motherboards are still a bit more affordable. 

So, let's consider platform cost and performance for each brand from budget perspective. I am taking Ryzen 5 7600 from team AMD as it is the cheapest of the bunch(technically 8400F is the cheapest but you are losing performance with it). And i5-13400F will represent team Intel. While you can argue that 12400F is a lot more cheaper, I'm targeting identical gaming performance here, and 13400F is a lot more closer to 7600 than 12400F. Plus in multicore performance, situation becomes worse for 12400F. 

So here is the entry level combination of CPU + Motherboard + RAM if you want to "future proof" your pc build.

Before anyone furiously started typing that I'm being unfair to Intel by not picking cheaper Motherboard and RAM available, I did the same for AMD as well. There are cheaper B650 motherboards below ₹10k and cheaper DDR5 memory as well. But I picked "future proof" motherboard with 4 RAM slot, 3 M.2 SSD slot and built-in Wi-Fi. Also I picked a RGB DDR5 kit with recommended/ideal 6000MHz CL30 speeds. I wanted to somewhat match the feature set on Intel platform as well. 

It is safe to say that we are looking at ₹6000 price difference on average on both platform. Is ₹6K a significant price difference? Well it depends on the total PC build budget. For ₹6k, you can get a RTX 3060/4060 instead of RTX 3050, you can get RX 7700 XT instead of RTX 4060 Ti 8GB. Or it can add to the budget for better PSU, Cabinet, cooler etc. 

In fact here is my advise, if your budget is under ₹80k, get Ryzen 5000 series or Intel 12th gen and invest on better GPU instead of getting AM5. Only people with the budget of ₹90K and above should start considering AM5.