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AMD has just quietly launched its cheapest CPU

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.

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