<\/p>\n
The Club386 team dropped in to see AMD while we were roaming Computex 2026, and after a good natter with senior technical marketing manager, Donny Woligroski, we came away glad that this veteran chipmaker hasn\u2019t completely forgotten PC gamers.<\/p>\n
These are undoubtedly strange times for hardware enthusiasts, and in previous years, I\u2019d have been champing at the bit for some brand-new gaming CPU tech. As such, in some ways, it looks a bit rubbish that one of AMD\u2019s biggest Computex 2026 announcements was that it\u2019s resurrecting a four-year-old CPU. In a world where DDR5 RAM prices are downright silly, though, this was exactly what I wanted. I even called for AMD to bring back the 5800X3D back at the end of 2025.<\/p>\n
Woligroski told us this wasn\u2019t an easy task. The 5800X3D has been out of production for a while now, and he said the chip needed to be entirely respun (re-engineered) for mass fabrication. It\u2019s still the same chip, right down to the OPN (part number) on the heatspreader, but AMD has clearly taken this rerelease very seriously. Producing 5800X3D means there\u2019s a real opportunity cost of not building, for example, high-margin Epycs on AMD\u2019s TSMC wafer allocation.<\/p>\n
It knows there\u2019s a huge ecosystem of AM4 users who now can\u2019t afford to upgrade to AM5 systems, as DDR5 RAM is so ludicrously expensive. With the 5800X3D, however, these gamers can keep their existing DDR4 RAM and just drop this CPU into their motherboard. It even comes with a carbon nanotube thermal pad in the box, so you can strap your cooler to it without worrying about reapplying paste a couple of years down the line.<\/p>\n
This isn\u2019t AMD just finding some old Zen 3 stock and reselling it \u2013 the company has invested in refabricating it, at considerable cost. You don\u2019t do that if you\u2019re only planning a limited production run \u2013 it simply isn\u2019t worth the resources. That means this CPU is likely to be produced at a large scale, and naturally, some of these chips won\u2019t quite make the grade. Does that mean we might see more X3D chips in the future?<\/p>\n
Unsurprisingly, Woligroski couldn\u2019t say either way, but given what AMD has poured into this rerelease so far, I\u2019d be very surprised if the 5800X3D is the last AM4 X3D rerelease we see. Otherwise, what\u2019s going to happen to all the samples that can\u2019t clock as high as the 5800X3D, or where a couple of cores don\u2019t work properly? Making a wider lineup of CPUs just makes sense in terms of efficiency. I\u2019d be surprised if we didn\u2019t see the 5700X3D making a similar return. Heck, maybe there will be some golden samples that can clock higher, paving the way for a 5900X3D.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s this production efficiency that\u2019s very probably led to AMD\u2019s other CPU announcement at Computex, the Ryzen 7 7700X3D (pictured in my hand above). Again, this isn\u2019t new tech \u2013 it\u2019s based on AMD\u2019s last-gen Zen 4 architecture. The Ryzen 7 9800X3D and 9850X3D are selling well, even at their high prices, but there\u2019s clearly a market for cheaper chips equipped with 3D V-Cache, especially when you now have to spend so much of your budget on DDR5 RAM and storage.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s why AMD is still selling its cheaper, last-gen 7800X3Ds by the bucketload (it\u2019s #3 on Amazon UK\u2019s CPU top sellers chart). There will be some chips that don\u2019t quite make the grade on AMD\u2019s production line, but can function well enough at 4.5GHz rather than 5GHz, and hey presto, there\u2019s the 7700X3D, which AMD can sell for $330. That\u2019s admittedly not a great price when you can pick up a 7800X3D for $338 anyway, but hopefully the 7700X3D\u2019s real-world price will be lower.<\/p>\n
What I really liked to see, though, was that AMD\u2019s still serious about gaming hardware. Yes, this is old tech, and the MSRPs could be more generous, but in general, AMD\u2019s response is good for PC gaming hardware enthusiasts in this warped market.<\/p>\n
We all know AMD could have put these consumer-focused resources into datacentre-specific AI tech instead and made much more money. There\u2019s really no business reason why AMD had to rerelease an AM4 chip to give owners of old motherboards an upgrade path, but it did it anyway. That\u2019s just what we needed in these bleak times for PC gaming hardware, and hats off to AMD for doing it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Club386 team dropped in to see AMD while we were roaming Computex 2026, and after a good natter with senior technical marketing manager, Donny Woligroski, we came away glad that this veteran chipmaker hasn\u2019t completely forgotten PC gamers. These are undoubtedly strange times for hardware enthusiasts, and in previous years, I\u2019d have been champing<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8869,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[8387,655,2316,1720,8172,8388,4484,8386,4405],"class_list":{"0":"post-8868","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-pc-gaming","8":"tag-am4","9":"tag-amd","10":"tag-bone","11":"tag-coming","12":"tag-computex","13":"tag-cpus","14":"tag-gamers","15":"tag-threw","16":"tag-x3d"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8868","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8868"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8868\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8869"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8868"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8868"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beteja.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}