Image: Adam Patrick Murray / IDG
If you were planning on cancelling your restaurant reservation to stand in line at Micro Center on Valentine’s Day in order to purchase one of AMD’s new Ryzen 7000X3D CPU, you should reconsider.
After reports began circulating that showed AMD’s website listing February 14 as the availability date of its highly anticipated Ryzen 7000X3D CPU, the company has had to officially poured cold water on the idea.
“As you know, today AMD.com briefly published a launch date for the Ryzen 7000X3D Series Desktop processors; however, that date is incorrect. We have not confirmed a launch date at this time. We will provide updates on the expected availability of these processors at a future date,” a company spokesman said in an email to PCWorld on Wednesday afternoon.
The update from AMD may be bad for gearheads looking to score an X3D chip, but probably good news for relationships around the world. The original report surfaced courtesy of Overclock3D.net, which spotted the new information on AMD.com. Soon after the initial report, AMD yanked the availability date and now has officially disavowed it as an error.
More disappointing to many, however, is the fact that AMD didn’t leak its own price. Since the variant processors include AMD’s V-cache, the vertical die-stacking “special sauce” that gives the processors a gaming advantage, you can expect a premium over the vanilla Ryzen 9 7900X and Ryzen 9 7950X. Those non-X3D CPUs have retail prices of $549 and $699, respectively, though street prices have seen significant discounts.
According to promotional benchmarks from AMD, the top-of-the-line 7950X3D can beat Intel’s best Core i9 processor in both gaming and (thanks to that generous 24-core architecture) general productivity and media production tasks. It is, in short, a beast, and the cheaper 8- and 12-core variants should show similar performance gains.
And no, standing in line at Micro Center is not a good idea for a Valentine’s date.
Gordon Mah Ung contributed to this report
Author: Michael Crider, Staff Writer
Michael is a former graphic designer who’s been building and tweaking desktop computers for longer than he cares to admit. His interests include folk music, football, science fiction, and salsa verde, in no particular order.