From PC Mag: AMD’s AM4 socket platform has had a good run—it presided over the company's spectacular, phoenix-like ascent in desktop processors with the introduction of the first Ryzen family in 2017. But its time as a leading-edge platform is almost at an end. AMD has already announced that its AM5 platform will launch in the fall. But before that happens, AM4 gets one last star turn, and existing AM4 customers gain a retroactive upgrade path that we rarely see in the PC market nowadays.
Come April, AMD will ship seven new desktop CPUs, including what it claims will be its fastest AM4 gaming processor to date, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D. At the same time, AMD is pushing to make available BIOS updates for the oldest AM4 motherboards, enabling owners of original Ryzen systems to upgrade to new Ryzen 5000-series processors.
The new Ryzen 5000 CPUs are (from high end to low) the Ryzen 7 5700X, the Ryzen 5 5600, and the Ryzen 5 5500. All of these are built on the Zen 3 architecture and are similar to existing processors in the 5000 series. Gauging by their specs, though, they appear to offer better value.
The top new chip is the Ryzen 7 5700X. It is virtually identical to AMD’s Ryzen 7 5800X, which launched back in 2020 at a price of $449. Both chips have the same number of cores and the same amount of cache. The Ryzen 7 5700X will likely be marginally slower than the 5800X, as its base clock is 400MHz lower and its turbo is a mere 100MHz lower. But at the same time, the Ryzen 7 5700X is far more affordable, at $299. We’ve not tested the Ryzen 7 5700X yet, but the on-paper specs suggest there's no way you would see $150 worth of added performance in the older 5800X from that negligible difference in clock speed.
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