Alongside their shiny new Ryzen 9000 series, AMD also launched a couple new Zen 3-based processors. Despite being old enough to enter primary school by now, AMD is not letting their older AM4 platform die as they continue making newer processors for the budget friendly platform.
Architecturally, there aren’t any major surprises here as it’s still basically the same Zen 3 chip as previous Ryzen 5000 series processors launched since 2020, and are made on the TSMC 7nm process. It does however use a new naming scheme with the -XT suffix on the back, which will certainly not cause confusion with their own Radeon RX 5000 XT series graphics cards, but I digress. It’s also not the first time AMD released late-generation XT CPUs either, having done so with the Ryzen 3000 XT lineup.
With the Ryzen 5000XT then you’ll get two new processors, and sitting at the top is the AMD Ryzen 9 5900XT. It’s a 16-core, 32-thread CPU with base clocks of 3.3GHz and boosts of up to 4.8GHz as well as 72MB of total L2 and L3 cache. Despite its name suggesting that it’s pretty similar to the Ryzen 9 5900X, that’s actually a 12-core chip; the Ryzen 9 5900XT has more in line with the Ryzen 9 5950X, sharing similar core counts with just a slightly lower clock speed.
Sitting below the Ryzen 9 5900XT then is the Ryzen 7 5800XT. Now this actually is pretty close to the original Ryzen 7 5800X, sharing the same 8-cores, 16-threads and 36MB of L2 and L3 cache, but offering ever so slightly higher max boost clocks of up to 4.8GHz from a base clock of 3.8GHz. Both the Ryzen 9 5900XT and the Ryzen 7 5800XT will also come with a 105W TDP, and the latter also has an AMD Wraith Prism stock cooler with RGB lighting bundled in the box.
Regarding its performance, AMD states a modest improvement of up to 4% compared to the Intel Core i7-13700K for the Ryzen 9 5900XT and a slightly higher gaming performance improvement of up to 12% for the Ryzen 7 5800XT compared to the Intel Core i5-13600KF. That being said, the Ryzen 5000XT would be a nice drop-in upgrade for those with older AM4-based systems looking for an easy upgrade without needing a new motherboard too, though the Ryzen 7 5700X3D may make more sense if your main goal is just for gaming.
As for pricing, there’s no word just yet from AMD on how much these Ryzen 5000XT series processors will cost, but we do expect it to launch sometime next month alongside the Ryzen 9000 series.
