I'm thinking it'll probably launch at 249, enough to undercut AMD but still making a decent margin. Although if they end up being super confident in the performance they might launch it higher, but I think you're right in it beating the 7600X in price by a good chunk.
As for the DDR support, I think that's going to be a MAJOR sticking point for a lot of people. AMD very well may have shot themselves in the foot with budget builders by going Apple mode with the whole "DDR5 is the future and by future we mean it's your only option". I can understand them wanting to maximize platform performance, and for the higher end parts I think that's a smart move, but we're definitely in a transition period right now and they're probably going to lose a lot of the budget market. I'm on a 5600X and decided to go with DDR4-3600 to achieve clock parity with the IF for that sweet, sweet latency reduction. I was able to scoop up 32GB of it for about $135 and that was in 2021. The cheapest DDR5-6000 (AMD's recommendation for the same IF clock parity) kit I can find right now is 32GB going for $209.99, not a massive increase but 75 bucks extra is still pretty significant and way out of the range of any budget-conscious builder. AFAIK there aren't any 16GB DDR5-6000 kits available right now, at least at my local microcenter anyways.
I think AMD is pretty heavily targeting high-end builders with this launch, which is fine, enthusiast-tier FTW, I just think this move has pretty much guaranteed Intel taking the budget leadership position. Maybe they know something we don't, maybe DDR5 is about to drop in price making it more attractive for the average custom builder and B650/X670 boards won't be as expensive as we think but that has yet to be seen. It's definitely clear that AMD has realized the FX death-march is over, they've proven themselves, and feel comfortable charging premium prices again. I just hope they don't get drunk off their success like Intel did back in the early 2010s. We'll have to wait and see.
To your point about AMD's recommendation when it comes to the DDR5: who says you have to listen it? You can
As I said above, anyone who is looking at a full platform upgrade, but is balking at a potential $50-75 dollar difference in upgrade costs, shouldn't be upgrading in the first place.
In your case, you're on the latest release from AMD. Upgrading for you, assuming you have the same use-cases for your system, doesn't make much sense either performance-wise or price-wise, unless you simply wanted the latest shit, in which case, that $75 shouldn't matter since you almost always pay more to be a first or early-adopter. For someone on an older CPU (1st or 2nd-gen Ryzen), or older platform entirely (pre-Ryzen or older Intels), the performance uplift would be so massive, that $75 dollar difference should've been considered (and budgeted for)
long-before any thoughts of an upgrade crawled into their heads.
While someone upgrading might want the latest and greatest (and might not want to upgrade to a dead-end platform), there's still nothing stopping a person in the latter of the above categories (someone on pre-Ryzen or older Intels) from getting into an AM4 platform if they truly
need an upgrade but don't have the immediate funds for AM5 (or Raptor Lake, for that matter). They're still plenty fast, they're still plenty efficient, and you'll still see plenty of availability of both motherboards and CPUs (as well as good DDR4 memory) as the years go on.
Lastly, I think it's still a bit odd that people are so certain that the lower-end Raptor Lake CPUs are going to be these price-performance world-beaters. It's quite possible that the platform benefits provided by Raptor Lake scale heavily the higher you go up the product stack.
), give me more money and give you more ram but if dont need more, why must be give you more money 
