AMD extends 3.5-year-old Ryzen 5000 CPU family with two new-but-old Zen 3 chips

Along with all the more unambiguous newness announced by AMD at the Computex show including the all-new Ryzen 9000 desktop CPUs and Ryzen AI 300 laptops APUs, both of which sport AMD's latest Zen 5 architecture, AMD has something more familiar to offer. Two new variants of the Ryzen 5000 Series, originally launched in October 2020, have been announced.

The Ryzen 9 5900XT is a 16-core chip that sits in between the existing Ryzen 9 5900X and 5950X models, while the Ryzen 7 5800XT closely mirrors the eight-core Ryzen 7 5800X. In theory, an eight-core CPU is the more interesting option for gamers, so let's start there.

The new 5800XT sports eight Zen 3-spec cores on a single CCD, which hooks into AMD's I/O and memory controller die. In nearly every way, the new 5800 XT is almost identical to the old 5800X. So, that's eight cores, 16 threads, 105 W TDP, 36MB of cache, the works.

The only difference is that the new 5800 XT gets a 4.8 GHz maximum boost clock, whereas the plain old 5800X made do with 4.7 GHz. Obviously things have moved on since the Ryzen 5000 Series and Zen 3 were announced back in 2020. But the 5800X remains a pretty effective gaming chip, so the 5800XT should be every bit as good.

If there is a snag, it's pricing. Officially, AMD originally pegged the new Ryzen 7 5800XT at $249, before claiming this was an error. So, as yet there is no official price, but while $249 wouldn't be a terrible price—especially when you consider that the 5800X launched at $449—though right now on Newegg, you can grab a 5800X for just $198.98. We'll see what the new chip actually sells for, but if it is $249, it's not exactly moving the needle.

While 16-core CPUs aren't necessarily natural gaming chips, the Ryzen 9 5900XT is actually the more interesting of the two new CPUs. That's because the old 5900X only offered 12 cores, you had to grab the megabucks Ryzen 9 5950X to get 16 cores.

Again, we don't have a final price for the new 5900XT, but the originally, erroneously listed