AMD’s new pitch: our old tech is so good you should just keep using it
Overview & Key Takeaways
Computex 2026 is underway in Taiwan, and we're expecting all manner of flashy computers with jaw-dropping pricetags (or no pricetags at all) as the entire industry navigates RAMageddon. But for desktop PC gamers, AMD has a different pitch. It's relaunching three old components alongside a big new promise: you won't need to buy a new […]
Computex 2026 is underway in Taiwan, and we’re expecting all manner of flashy computers with jaw-dropping pricetags (or no pricetags at all) as the entire industry navigates RAMageddon.
But for desktop PC gamers, AMD has a different pitch. It’s relaunching three old components alongside a big new promise: you won’t need to buy a new motherboard until 2030.
Today, AMD is promising it will keep supporting its AM5 desktop motherboard socket with new Ryzen processors through 2029, which likely means you can keep upgrading to newer CPUs till the end of the decade without changing your board.
Even if you’re still on the older AM4 socket, you may have one last upgrade left: it’s relaunching a “10th Anniversary” edition of the Ryzen 7 5800X3D to celebrate the 10th anniversary of that AM4 platform. That’ll be $349 on June 25th.
And if you decide now’s the time to switch to AMD or the AM5 socket, the company’s got a new old chip for that too: a $330 Ryzen 7 7700X3D, likely a binned version of the existing 7800X3D. The beefier chip costs $380 to $450, though can occasionally be found at $320. On paper, the 7700X3D looks only slightly slower:
Again, this is old tech: the 7800X3D came out in 2023; its 9000-series successor came out in late 2024. But the old chip was plenty powerful, as you can see in my colleague Tom Warren’s comparison review with the 9950X3D, 9800X3D, and 7800X3D from 2025. (Check out how much less power the 7800X3D used in his chart, too.)
Meanwhile in the GPU realm, AMD’s finally bringing its formerly China-exclusive Radeon RX 9070 GRE to other countries including the US, starting June 1st for $549.
That’s not quite as friendly for PC gamers to hear, as $549 was supposed to be the starting price for the notably more powerful RX 9070, not the cut-down GRE version which trails the RTX 5070.
But the RX 9070 was never broadly available at $549, despite what AMD claimed to us at the time — it launched amidst a GPU shortage, hit $549 once, but the price settled closer to $599 or $620 once that shortage ended. So this would be a bit cheaper.
AMD’s making an interesting pitch at a time that everything, especially gaming, is beginning to feel too expensive. Does it convince you?
