The Ryzen 9600X, which was posted on Amazon Canada yesterday and has since been removed, is extremely expensive.

Twitter user @momomo_us spotted the page on Amazon with an official listing for the six-core Ryzen 5 9600X CPU, the most affordable CPU in AMD's range of Ryzen 9000 CPUs, which will launch on 31 July. 

The original listing shows a price of 475 Canadian dollars. That's $200 more than the Ryzen 5 7600X currently retails for on the same site. Looking back to the launch of the Ryzen 7000 series and pricing since then, the older CPU has never cost that much, spending most of its life at around the $320 mark in Canada.

Meanwhile, in the US, it launched for $299, but as with most places, it saw a massive price cut recently and was available for as little as $180 in the Amazon Prime sale.

Even allowing for a generous conversion from Canadian to US dollars puts the Ryzen 5 9600X at more than $300 - not significantly more than the Ryzen 5 7600X. That CPU has seen a massive price cut, falling from $299 at launch to just $180 in the Prime sale and much of its time spent recently at just $200. That's a massive fall in percentage terms and was for an excellent reason - it simply wasn't competitive against Intel's Core i5-13600K and was the weaker CPU in the Ryzen 7000 Zen 4 line-up released two years ago.

Unless AMD the chip can compete with current AMD and Intel CPUs, it could face the same fate. If it does land at over $300, it faces a nemesis in AMD's own Ryzen 7 7800X3D, which costs just $385 right now on Amazon.

It remains to be seen how well the new Ryzen 9000 CPUs fare in games against the current generation 3D V-cache models, but the latter will likely offer similar or better overall performance. Still, AMD is competing with itself at this point, with Intel still launching its next-generation Arrow Lake-S desktop processors.

Pricing for the other models in the range is still unknown but we expect it to be similar to the Ryzen 7000 series.