Unsurprisingly, the AMD Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X don't seem to be selling very well right now

The recently launched AMD Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X have been the subject of much… apathy? Indifference? Underwhelm? Take your pick. The epitome of these Zen 5 architecture chips has probably been the whole «Zen 5%» meme, referring to a mere 5% (or thereabouts) increase in performance. It's not that these new chips are bad—far from it—they're just not good enough for the cost. 

It's of little surprise, then, that we hear they're not selling all too well—at least if Mindfactory's sales numbers (via TechPowerUp) are anything to go by. At the time of writing, the website says that «over 20» 9600X SKUs and «over 30» 9700X SKUs have been sold.

There are many possible reasons for these low sales numbers. For one, it's only a few days since these CPUs hit the shelves and people are still waiting for even more to do so. PC gamers are likely waiting to see what a 9000-series X3D CPU will be like—X3D referring to the 3D V-Cache that currently adorns the best gaming CPU, the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D.

People are also probably waiting to see what next-gen Intel chips (codename Arrow Lake) have in store. The latest rumours suggest that these 15th Gen Intel chips could consume up to 100 W less power at high frequencies than the 14th Gen ones (this being a spark of light during a dark time for Intel given the 13th/14th Gen stability issues).

I must say, though, it wouldn't make much sense for efficiency to be what people are waiting for, because say what you want about the 9600X and 9700X, they are at the very least efficient. In Nick's testing of these 65 W TDP chips, he found them both to sip power and remain plenty cool even under load.

Performance isn't entirely unreasonable, either, especially for the 9700X, which does seem like the better value chip given its two extra cores vs the 9600X's six-core layout. Where the 9600X pales compared to the Intel Core i5 14600K in multi-threaded workloads, the 9700X, while still behind, gives a better run for its money and is even better