There’s still plenty of life left in AMD’s veteran AM4 platform, as the company has seemingly just announced a new line up of CPUs based on the Zen 3 microarchitecture. The AMD Ryzen 5000XT range appeared in a presentation given by AMD in China, and it looks as though these new AM4 CPUs will be priced keenly.
This isn’t the first time AMD has expanded an existing lineup of CPUs with the ‘XT’ suffix. Back in 2020, AMD breathed new life into its Zen 2 architecture with a series of 3000XT CPUs. Aimed at battling Intel’s 10th gen chips for the best gaming CPU title, the Ryzen 3900XT, Ryzen 7 3800XT, and Ryzen 5 3600XT upped the clock speeds by 100-200MHz compared to their X-branded predecessors, and AMD may be looking at doing the same again with this new round of CPUs.
If the Ryzen 5000XT series does indeed follow suit, we wouldn’t expect them to include the 3D v-cache featured in the company’s X3D chips, but would instead expect them to pick up from where their X-branded predecessors left off, but with a clock speed bump.
So, for example, the Ryzen 9 5900XT could have 12 cores and a 4.9GHz boost clock, the Ryzen 7 5800XT could have eight cores and a 4.9GHz boost clock, and the Ryzen 5 5600XT could have six cores and a 4.7GHz boost clock.
This is all speculation, though, and we don’t even know if these new CPUs will get an international launch yet. All we know about it so far is what we’ve gleaned from a presentation photo from China posted on X (formerly Twitter) by tech leaker @9550pro, and reported by Wccftech, which we’ve shared below.
With the AMD Zen 5 release date reportedly coming soon, and the company’s existing Zen 4 lineup already dominating the gaming charts, there’s potentially room for a series of new CPUs that give the old AM4 platform a boost. If previous launches of new AM4 CPUs are a reliable yardstick, you may well even be able to install one of these new Ryzen 5000XT CPUs in a first gen Ryzen motherboard with an X370 chipset, assuming it gets a BIOS update.
The only factor stopping these older motherboards from supporting new AM4 CPUs, in fact, is room for details of the whole AM4 CPU back catalog in the BIOS, meaning you may need to sacrifice support for older CPUs in order to get your motherboard to support one of these new chips.
In the meantime, if you’re looking to upgrade your PC, or even construct a new one from scratch, make sure you read our full guide on how to build a gaming PC, where we take you through the whole process from start to finish.