AMD Ryzen 9 5900XT and 5800XT show AM4 CPUs just won’t die

There is nothing wrong with your browser. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. You’d be forgiven for questioning what year it is with the newly announced AMD Ryzen 9 5900XT and 7 5800XT CPUs, but it is indeed 2024. It seems Team Red just isn’t ready to say goodbye to its enduring AM4 platform just yet.

As you might’ve gleaned from AMD’s Radeon graphics cards, the XT nomanclature is simply to denote that these are faster than 5900X and 5800X. It starts to blur the line between product types, which might get a little confusing for first-time buyers, but it joins the club of very strange naming schemes from the brand this year. Just take Ryzen AI 300 series as an example, as we wave goodbye to U, H, and HS, suffixes in laptops.

The name is no stranger than the actual product, though. Introducing AM4-based CPUs on the very same day the company extends its AM5 platform through to 2027 and reveals flagship Ryzen 9000 processors is certainly a bold move. This is the second time AMD has revisited its Ryzen 5000 series after introducing its renowned X3D cache, but it’s now two generations behind instead of one. Of course, all of this then begs the question: who exactly is this for?

Ryzen 9 5900XT is a first for AMD in that it overhauls a previous flagship with 33% more cores and threads, as well as a loftier cache. From top to bottom, the specs are superior to the original without increasing power consumption. According to AMD’s internal tests, you can expect R9 5900XT performance to be on par with or slightly exceeding Intel Core i7-13700K in games like Red Dead Redemption 2. In that title specifically, that’s an average of a 10% improvement over 5900X, although this will undoubtedly vary depending on the game.

Ryzen 7 5800XT, meanwhile, is nearly identical to its predecessor. You get a slightly higher 4.8GHz boost clock and a bundled AMD Wraith Prism RGB air cooler, but the specs sheet doesn’t tell the full story. Whether it’s the 0.1GHz uplift or some other secret sauce, internal performance figures suggest it’ll sit on par with Intel Core i5-13600K. Using Red Dead Redemption 2 as an example once again, this means you’ll see roughly between a 5% to 9% frame rate improvement over Ryzen 7 5800X. In some cases, such as Cyberpunk 2077, it eclipses its rival by a considerable 12%. If nothing else, it’s a testament to the scalability of AM4, but it’s a wonder we didn’t see something like this sooner.

As promising as these performance claims sound, they likely won’t stand up to the might of Ryzen 7 5800X3D in gaming. The additional L3 cache (96MB) gives it some of the best frame rates possible, eclipsing the 5000X series by quite a margin. Where XT will shine is in applications and stability.

Price is the be-all and end-all for products like these, and it’s something we don’t yet know. Historically, AMD hasn’t been the best with MSRP. Since it’s bringing the fight to Intel’s 13th Gen, we might be able to take i7-13700K’s £350 and i5-13600K’s £250 as a ballpark. Considering you can currently grab 5900X for £240 and 5800X for £172, that would demand 45% more for a rough 10% improvement. Hopefully, these guesstimates are wrong, however. Take them with a pinch of salt until an official announcement.

If AMD positions them with a good MSRP, it raises the bar for those in the budget AM4 ecosystem to upgrade without sinking their life savings into a new motherboard, RAM, and processor. If not, they could easily be dead in the water. We’ll find out more when the processors land in July 2024.

Don’t expect these CPUs to be as flashy as AMD’s Ryzen 9000 series, which also debuted at Computex. In fact, it’s been a busy one for Team Red, which also announced 300 AI series mobile chips, a slimmer Radeon Pro W7900, and an Instinct MI325X GPU with HBM3E memory.