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No one is buying AMD’s new Zen 5 CPUs, and it’s painfully obvious why

By Jacob Roach Published August 14, 2024

The Ryzen 9 9900X sitting on its box. — Jacob Roach / Digital Trends

AMD’s new Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X, which were aimed at claiming a spot among the best processors, are off to a rocky start. According to early sales numbers from German retailer Mindfactory, the number of new AMD CPUs the website has shipped is only in the double digits, despite being on the market for nearly a week.

Mindfactory is only one retailer, but it actually displays the number of products it sold on its website. The Ryzen 5 9600X has seen over 20 sales, while the Ryzen 7 9700X has had over 30. You can see the lack of enthusiasm for Zen 5 CPUs elsewhere, though. On Amazon’s bestsellers page, the last-gen Ryzen 7 7800X3D ranks in the first spot. The first Zen 5 CPU on the list, the Ryzen 7 9700X, is in 47th place.

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At this point, it’s fairly obvious why these CPUs aren’t off to a great start. As you can see in our Ryzen 9 9950X and Ryzen 9 9900X review, AMD’s latest CPUs provide barely any increase in gaming performance. They’re often beat by Intel’s competing Core i9-14900K, and AMD’s own Ryzen 7 7800X3D runs away with gaming performance. Even in productivity apps, where the gains are more pronounced, AMD still doesn’t dominate across workloads.

The big problem for the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X is AMD’s 3D V-Cache tech. Given the slim performance gains, most users are probably waiting to see what chips like the Ryzen 7 9800X3D have to offer. That’s what we saw in the previous generation. Even months after releasing, AMD’s initial batch of Zen 4 CPUs saw terrible sales.

It doesn’t help that these last-gen CPUs are much cheaper now, too. Despite cutting the launch price of the Zen 5 range, AMD’s Zen 4 CPUs are still around $100 cheaper across the board.

Over time, AMD’s new Zen 5 options will drop in price and they’ll become the go-to options once Zen 4 stock has slowly disappeared from store shelves. At the moment, however, it doesn’t look like the CPUs are wildly popular. Although 3D V-Cache has been a huge boon to AMD’s gaming dominance, it’s also led to a level of segmentation within AMD’s lineup that’s not the easiest to navigate.

We expect 3D V-Cache versions of Ryzen 9000 CPUs some time in early 2025, but AMD hasn’t announced a release date yet. By that point, I suspect sales for Zen 5 CPUs will be in a much different spot.

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Jacob Roach is the lead reporter for PC hardware at Digital Trends. In addition to covering the latest PC components, from…

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