Ahead of the launch of AMD’s upcoming Ryzen 3000 CPUs and Navi graphics cards, the company has another momentous event to celebrate: its 50th birthday. Like Intel in 2018 with its 40th, AMD isn’t letting this anniversary pass without some special edition hardware. Its flagship graphics card and gamer CPU, the Radeon VII and Ryzen 2700X respectively, will be sold as anniversary editions with some physical changes, and potentially performance enhancements.
In 2018 Intel celebrated its 40th anniversary with a special CPU named after its very first, the Intel Core i7-8086K. It was in reality a specially binned 8700K that could boost to 5GHz, making it more of a collector’s item than a truly new and enhanced component. Especially with the ninth-generation 9700K and 9900K just around the corner. AMD isn’t offering hardware with nostalgic names, so it’s more obvious what you’re getting for your money — or at least it should be when we learn more about them.
At this stage we have a picture, a launch date, and some speculative pricing. The image turfed up by VideoCardz shows the gold-tinted packaging of both the Radeon VII and Ryzen 2700X anniversary edition components. The Radeon VII appears to have been given a new red shroud for its cooler. It’s not clear if any physical changes have been made to the 2700X, but it’s possible that its bundled cooler will feature similar red tinting.
The big date in the image is April 29, which is a couple of days before AMD’s official 50th anniversary on May 1. That would suggest the two products will hit online retailers then, likely in limited numbers.
The big question for prospective buyers will be what kind of performance difference can be expected. These will likely be especially binned (selected) to allow greater clock speed headroom leading to increased stock boost clocks. We might see the 2700X go from its standard 4.3GHz to 4.5GHz, for example. Since these aren’t drastically different products, though, we wouldn’t expect giant leaps in performance.
Pricing will be a major point of contention, too. As special editions of existing hardware we would expect prices to be higher than usual. Both the Radeon VII and 2700X have seen price reductions in the past week though, so it may be that they aren’t much more expensive than their stock counterparts were just recently.
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