AMD has just quietly launched its cheapest CPU

By Monica J. White Published January 15, 2025

The AMD Ryzen 5 7600X3D CPU. — Micro Center

Most of AMD’s new products get a whole launch event with a lot of fanfare, but some of them don’t get as much as a mention. The latter is true for the Ryzen 5 7400F, which just showed up out of nowhere as part of AMD’s product stack. A member of AMD’s Zen 4 lineup, this CPU is the slowest Ryzen 7000 offering of the bunch, so it’s in no danger of becoming one of the best processors — but there’s one thing that could make it an interesting option.

Despite appearing in its full glory on AMD’s website, the Ryzen 5 7400F is a bit of a mystery in the sense that we don’t know when it’ll be available. We do know its specs, though. Built on the Raphael architecture and for the AM5 socket, this isn’t an APU, but a desktop processor for consumers. The Ryzen 5 7400F comes with six cores, 12 threads, and a boost clock of up to 4.7GHz.

Recommended Videos

AMD is no stranger to six-core CPUs — after all, even the Ryzen 5 9600X is still a six-core part, for better or worse. The 7400F has a thermal design power (TDP) of 65 watts and packs 32MB of L3 cache. It’s really not too different from the Ryzen 5 7500F, which sports the exact same specs but with a higher 5.0GHz boost clock.

Oh? Ryzen 5 7400Fhttps://t.co/uGMig9Dqoc

— Everest (@Olrak29_) January 15, 2025

The difference between the 7500F and the 7400F, frequency aside, is that the 7500F wasn’t meant to be available globally outside of prebuilts. It can still be found up for sale at some retailers, but it was never officially released by AMD as a consumer product. Meanwhile, the 7400F is listed with “global” availability, implying it’ll be sold just as any AMD CPU.

AMD has listed the product, but we’re not sure when or where it’ll appear for sale. The 7500F is sold by third-party sellers on Newegg, and it costs $162. With that in mind, if the Ryzen 5 7400F isn’t even cheaper than that, there’d be little incentive for anyone to buy it.

If the Ryzen 5 7400F arrives with a sub-$150 price tag, it could be a hit for budget PC builds. There’s no cooler included in the Ryzen 5 7500F, so that would presumably be another expense to add on top, but it would still be a good deal. For now, we have no choice but to wait and see if the CPU starts showing up for sale at various retailers.

Monica J. White

Computing Writer

Monica is a computing writer at Digital Trends, focusing on PC hardware. Since joining the team in 2021, Monica has written…

Topics

Tech News

Computing

Intel needed a win — its new laptop CPU delivers just that

An MSI laptop sitting on a table.

It feels cliche at this point, but it's true. Intel can't catch a break. The new Arrow Lake-H chips feel like a tide shift for Team Blue, though, leveraging the highly efficient architectures the company debuted with Lunar Lake to deliver performance and battery life worthy of the best laptops on the market.
By the numbers
We've already seen what Intel's Lunar Lake processors are capable of -- read our Asus Zenbook S 14 review for more on that -- but these new Arrow Lake-H offerings are a bit different. Under the hood, Intel is still using its Lion Cove and Skymont core architectures, which Arrow Lake-H shares with Lunar Lake. However, these chips get a larger core count, higher power budget, and beefier integrated graphics based on Intel's Battlemage architecture.

The power budget is really important here. The base power is 45W, but Intel allows the chip to boost up to 115W for short periods of time. The core split is interesting, too. You get 16 total cores, but they're split between six performance cores, eight efficient cores, and two low-power efficient cores. If you remember, the efficient cores are actually the main performance driver in this architecture, so the extra two low-power ones are simply there for a little extra multi-core grunt.

Computing

AMD missed its shot for the top

Lisa Su, the CEO of AMD, pictured holding an AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT graphics card.

There's an unfortunate irony in the world of PC gaming right now. As soon as AMD decided to concede the flagship battle to Nvidia, Team Green put out what might be its most disappointing flagship offering in a decade in the form of the RTX 5080.

Each generation, we talk about the dynamic between AMD and Nvidia. And for close to a decade now, there's been a linear progression between the two brands. AMD originally focused on budget offerings to undercut Nvidia's mainstream range, but it slowly built up power each generation to eventually contest what Nvidia was able to do at a flagship level. We got two generations of a true, one-to-one battle between AMD and Nvidia. And right when AMD was about to get a leg up, it decided to drop for the count.
One step behind

Computing

Nvidia’s next GPU tipped to launch in just a few weeks

The RTX 5080 sitting on a pink background.

When Nvidia announced its RTX 50-series GPUs, it was light on details about the RTX 5070 Ti and RTX 5070 -- two cards that could make it among the best graphics cards, and the only two Blackwell GPUs available for under $1,000 right now. Nvidia has revealed that the GPUs are set to launch in February, but no specific dates have been confirmed yet.

The more expensive of the two, the RTX 5070 Ti at $749, is set to launch on February 20, according to VideoCardz. The outlet claims reviews will go live on February 19 for models set at list price, while cards priced above list will see reviews on Februrary 20. Nvidia has yet to confirm these dates publically, so treat this as a rumor for now.