AMD’s Plan to Fix RAM Costs: Bring Back Bygone CPUs - Gizmodo

The next generation of AMD gaming CPUs is the last generation of AMD gaming CPUs. With astronomical RAM prices gatekeeping gamers from upgrading, the chipmaker has released its former best-in-class AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D for a price better than whatever you’ll find on eBay. You can nab one of AMD’s Ryzen 7 5800X3D rehashes starting June 25, starting at $350. To put that price tag into perspective, it’s $100 less than the card cost at launch in 2022. A current-gen Ryzen 7 9850X3D—the chipmaker’s current best gaming CPU for AM5 motherboards—has a suggested list price of $500. The 5800X3D first launched in 2022, just a few months before AM5 socket motherboards hit the scene. Old is new again in other ways, too. AMD is preparing to launch the Ryzen 7 7700X3D, another eight-core, 16-thread previous-gen chip for the AM5 socket, priced at $330, on July 15. AMD called the chip its “entry point” for AM5. You may be wondering: why does a 4-year-old chip cost more than a more recent Ryzen 7000-series CPU? You can blame memory prices and the abusive resale market. That price may not seem like a bargain—unless you’ve hunted for one of these out-of-production chips yourself. I personally have firsthand experience trying to find a 5800X3D on reseller marketplaces, and the situation is not pretty. Many eBay listings in North America demand $450 or more for a 4-year-old CPU. AMD is going a step further by helping PC buyers who can’t afford to upgrade their graphics cards. Team Red is bringing its $550 Radeon RX 9070 GRE to the U.S. market. That’s essentially the same RX 9070 from 2025, but with 12GB of VRAM instead of 8GB. It was previously exclusive to China, which makes sense since it fills a strange niche inside AMD’s current graphics card lineup. The Radeon RX 9060 XT has 16GB of VRAM, the same as the company’s leading RX 9070 XT. The chipmaker has promised that the GRE card will be available starting June 1. AMD has been much better than Nvidia at keeping GPU costs relatively stable, though we don’t expect the $550 price tag to remain for very long. In effect, PC builders may be looking at sidegrades rather than full upgrades in 2026. Gamers with older hardware are better off keeping their old DDR4 RAM sticks, which cost less (but still more than they should) on reseller marketplaces. Essentially, AMD is being forced to extend 10-year-old AM4 motherboards even further into the future. The chipmaker has promised to continue AM5 through 2029, though by then, computing may already have stagnated on components made four, or even 10 years ago.