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

The next generation of AMD gaming CPUs is the last generation of AMD gaming CPUs. With steep RAM prices preventing gamers from upgrading, the chip maker has released its former best-in-class AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D at an even better price than you can find on eBay.

You can pick up one of AMD’s Ryzen 7 5800X3D rehashes starting on June 25 for $350. To put that price in perspective, that’s $100 less than the card will cost at launch in 2022. A current-gen Ryzen 7 9850X3D—the chip maker’s current best gaming CPU for an AM5 motherboard—has a suggested list price of $500. The 5800X3D was first launched in 2022, a few months before the arrival of AM5 socket motherboards.

In other ways too, the old is new again. AMD is preparing to launch the Ryzen 7 7700X3D, another eight-core, 16-thread previous-generation chip for the AM5 socket, on July 15, priced at $330. AMD has called the chip its “entry point” to AM5. You may be wondering: why does a 4-year-old chip cost more than a recent Ryzen 7000-series CPU? You can blame memory prices and the abusive resale market.

That price might not seem like a bargain – unless you’ve been looking for one of these out-of-production chips yourself. I personally have first-hand experience finding a 5800X3D on reseller markets, and the situation is not great. Many eBay listings in North America ask $450 or more for a 4 year old CPU.

AMD is going one step further by helping PC buyers who aren’t able to upgrade their graphics cards. Team Red is bringing its $550 Radeon RX 9070 GRE to the US market. It’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 an awkward niche inside AMD’s current graphics card lineup. The Radeon RX 9060 XT has 16GB of VRAM, the same as the company’s flagship RX 9070 XT.

The chip maker 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 that $550 price to stick around for too long. In fact, PC builders may be considering a sidegrade rather than a full upgrade in 2026. Gamers with older hardware are better off keeping their old DDR4 RAM sticks, which cost less (but still more than they cost) on reseller markets.

Essentially, AMD is being forced to push 10-year-old AM4 motherboards even further into the future. Chipmakers have promised to continue AM5 until 2029, though by then, computing may already have settled on components made four or 10 years ago.