No One Is Buying AMD Zen 5 CPUs, So What's Going On?

They sell everything they put into laptops, in that market they can't keep up with demand. Similar story for enterprise.

In the DIY desktop market, which this article is about, It's been instilled into everyone to wait for the X3D chips, by basically every reviewer. And for good reason.

Certainly doesn't help that:

a Windows 11 bug made performance look over 10% worse than it actually was on release, which is when all benchmarks are done and opinions are set (E: btw this has been fixed, and the fix also helped older CPUs too)
AMD decided to massively lower energy usage at the expense of out-of-box performance (I actually love this decision, I'm sick of components getting more and more power-hungry, and I'm sick of a hot stuffy room. Most gaming-focussed reviewers hated it though, which bugged me tbh because they also moan when power usage is high. I think they just like being negative because it drives engagement). At previous-gen TDPs, Zen 5 gains a lot of performance, but that's not how they are benchmarked.
the price of Zen 4 has dropped, and the 7800X3D in particular looks compelling to those who might've wanted Zen 5.
most DIY PC builders are PC gamers, and what do we need new CPUs for? Most gamers are more GPU bottlenecked right now, especially as people are moving to 1440p, 1440p ultrawide, or 4K. Add to that the fact that there have been very few good PC game releases this year and of course we're in a slump.
the only people who can buy a Zen5 CPU and drop it in their machine easily are Zen4 users, who won't see a large uplift and likely won't bother. People with earlier systems are looking at a significant investment - new motherboard and DDR5 RAM, why bother with that when the 5700X3D is such an insanely good value proposition that still won't be bottlenecked unless you're running an insanely good GPU?

the price of Zen 4 has dropped, and the 7800X3D in particular looks compelling to those who might’ve wanted Zen 5.
This is the big one.
Literally the best gaming chip from any company is a Zen 4 and surprisingly cheap
For most people they won't need anything more than a 7800x3d for 5 maybe even 10 years?
I'd hate to say what GPU it takes to make cpu the bottleneck on one of those.
- Agreed, I bought a 7950X3D over the 9950X as it was $150 cheaper. Seemed like the smarter move.
- I'm playing Satisfactory at High or Ultra settings 1440p ultrawide Lumen on with a Ryzen 7700x and a Radeon 7900GRE, and maintaining frame rates in the 80's. What is out now, or is in the works, that my machine can't run well?
- For most people they won't need anything more than a 7800x3d for 5 maybe even 10 years?
  I know from experience, it is very difficult to get 10 years of gaming out of a processor. I'm a pretty frugal guy, and I'm actually ok with merely "acceptable" gaming performance, but I think the most I've ever managed was 8 years on the same processor, and that was with the core 2 duo. I called it the super chip, the chip that stayed competitive even when multiple new architectures were available. And honestly, 8 years was really pretty good. But when I switched to a quad core i5, it was definitely a necessary change.
100%, it's the lack of the X3D parts. Zen 5 on its own is compelling but not for gamers and DIY, would I buy it in a pre-built desktop or a business machine, Yes I would all day long. But if I'm gaming and there's no X3D part why would I get anything else other than a 7800 X3D. AMD really shot themselves in the foot and what's worse is we warned them it was coming yet they chose not to listen.
Let me agree with you explicitly on loving the return to a sane power configuration here. I was watching Hardware Unboxed's retest of this after the patches and it takes almost fifteen minutes of them reiterating that the 9700X and the 14700K are tied for performance and price before they even mention the bombshell that the 9700X is doing that with about half the wattage.
The fact that we keep pushing reviews and benchmarks focused strictly on pedal-to-the-metal overclocked performance and nothing else is such a disgrace. I made the mistake to buy into a 13700K and I have it under lower than out of box power limits manually both to prevent longevity issues and because this damn computer is more effective as a hair dryer than anything else.
We don't mention it much because Intel was in the process of catching on actual fire at the same time, but the way this generation has been marketed, presented to reviewers, supported and eventually reviewed has been a massive trainwreck, considering the performance of the actual product.
I still have my 3700X and it keeps up well enough with a 4070 even on cyberpunk.
I'm still on my Zen1 1600, with DDR4 RAM and RX580 8GB which I built back in 2018. Whenever I'm thinking of upgrading I just look at the prices. I'd basically need to upgrade everything, maybe aside from GPU which would become a giant bottleneck, so it should be upgraded as well.
I really don't even want to think about gutting my PC and upgrading, I'd much rather switch to a console.
- Go grab you something later in the AM4 line, like a 5600 or so, and an RX6700, as long as your power supply is up to it.
- You could chuck a 57 or 5800X3D up in there for a substantial boost if your board vendor offers BIOS support.
Jup, built a new pc last year and went with a Ryzen 7600. The next CPU will be whatever has the best price to performance ratio of the last gen my mobo supports.
Yeah I’m still on my 5950X and it’s an absolute champ in terms of CPU load. Its second incarnation when I eventually upgrade is going to be a proxmox box.
My 3080 FE is starting to choke though… starting to get stutters and freezing and framedrops, and once in a while a full system lockup when I’m in Forza Motorsport… thinking of doing a coppermod to see if that addresses it, but I’m worried the GDDR may have just had to put up with too much heatsoak and might be going out :(
I just wrote a reply to this post as well, where I wrote that I'm going to upgrade my CPU soon but I'm probably going to get a Zen 4 X3D because they're faster than a Zen 5 CPU but based on what you wrote, should I change my decision? They're a good bit cheaper and without that Windows bug (I use Linux anyway) and if I overclock it to the TDP of the Zen 4 X3Ds, might they be faster after all? I saw something about that Windows bug and that they run at a lower TDP out of the box but I didn't find anything about how they run now and if you can overclock them since there's more headroom.
Edit: Also to just give a little context, I'm currently running a Ryzen 5 3600 with 16 gigs of DDR4 RAM but since I need to get a new mainboard and RAM anyway, I'm upgrading to 32 gigs of DDR5 RAM
- If you're gaming tbh I'd rather go with Zen4X3D or if you really want to, wait for Zen5X3D. Standard Zen5 isn't really worth it considering the dropping of Zen4 prices IMO
  Even with the performance boost of turning up the TDP, you're looking at pretty similar performance to the X3D chips, and in some games that really love cache, still a decent amount worse
  I also just upgraded from a 3600, but I did it to a 5700X3D, because it barely cost anything and only required dropping in a new CPU
What's up with 5800x3d prices being all wacked out

We’re all broke and performance improvements have been basically stagnant?

We're spending our money on fucking groceries... It's time to optimize, not upscale.
You'd think there would be some value-add in cranking out the older chips faster and at a lower price point, rather than aiming for a marginal improvement in spec that nobody has a use for yet.

Everything is expensive and everyone's underemployed thanks to all the damage large corporations have done to the job market and the economy as a whole.

I just want to make almost as much money as I made as a shift manager in fast food 10 years ago, which is a job I ironically walked away from to get educated. I just hope the democrats win so they can maybe reverse some of that anti homelessness stuff because we're all going to need it.

100%
People are making more money and growing poorer by the month.
- People are not growing poorer, they are growing richer
  https://www.bls.gov/charts/usual-weekly-earnings/usual-weekly-earnings-over-time-total-men-women.htm
  People make more money now than before the pandemic, even inflation adjusted
https://www.bls.gov/lau/stalt.htm
We measure this. Underemployment is not that high.
- Exactly. I really like the term "vibecession" coined by Kyla Scanlon, because it really hits this perfectly. People think things are bad, despite all evidence to the contrary.
  From the numbers I've seen, the average household (i.e. making <$70k/year) is maybe paying a few percent more on net than they were 5 years ago. Wages tend to lag inflation, so it makes sense that people's wages would still be catching up now that inflation is pretty much back to normal. It'll probably take another year or two, but it'll get there.

Waiting for 9000 X3D. For most people, 7800X3D is more performant than anything 9000 series.

I'm honestly thinking of building a new AM4 PC. 5700X3D is under 200€ new, cheap mobo, cheap DDR4 RAM and tbh the benchmarks aren't that far off this new 9xxx series in gaming (which is the only thing I really care about). I'd rather save some money and get a better GPU
Exactly, and my 5600 is still doing a great job. Give me a good deal and I'll upgrade, but I don't have a compelling reason right now to upgrade. Oh, and if I do need more performance, I can look at the AM4 X3D chip, which would be cheaper than getting AM5 and rebuilding my PC.

Me, with a 7800X3D:

My ex, with a 7800X3D:

Anotger friend, with a 7600:

Collectively: "why would we upgrade just one generation?"

Like, sure, I have a Threadripper 1st and 2nd gen. I'm weird like that. I have a VII and a 7900 XTX. But the 7xxx is fine. I went from TR 2950X to the 7800X3D. Do I want more cores? Fuck yeah. Am I going to pay thousands of dollars for a modern high-core TR? Lmfao no.

If I was building a new machine for someone, sure, 9xxx. But shit, even a 3xxx in my network is still kicking ass. Why the hell would I upgrade when I don't want to? And the 7xxx is cheaper and - mostly - offers the same performance.

Drop the price if they want to sell more, simple as that. And don't expect upgrades every release family.

Let's use the car as an example.... Imagine you must get to point B from point A following all the rules of the road which prevent the 🚓 🚨 police from chasing you and shooting you until they run out of bullets. Well then you will be on highway 5 at some point if you're in California, so let's assume you can't go faster than 85mph but at 5pm or 8am you can only go 2mph. So why would you buy a car that can drive at 5000mph is you don't want to? I totally agree with you on that point. Why eat ice cream 🍨🍦 if I don't want to....and it costs 10billion times more than not actually eating ice cream?
Same for cpus. Why get a new CPU if they put some bullshit things in it that your Linux can't use because they are made specifically for windows 11 and no one wants to use windows 11. Friends don't let friends use windows 11. Heck I wouldn't drive over a cat and then let the cat get windows 11. Only let the people you hate the most actually get windows 11. Like your boss. Fuck him. Let him get windows 11!

I got another 3-5 years with my 5800X3D

I have an other 2-3 years with my 1600.
- I've got another 5 or 6 years with my FX-8150.

Everybody has to support the new new underdog Intel.

I did! I bought shares when they tanked.
They're still tanking
- Good job! ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ

I'm sorry, but I don't have a grand to throw at a single fucking processor. I can put together a whole computer for that kind of coin.

My gaming desktop has a 5950x, I can run virtual machines and all games just fine. No reason to upgrade.

My Plex server runs an Intel 10400, handles everything I throw at it just fine. No reason to upgrade.

My home theater PC runs a Ryzen 1700 and again, runs just fine. No reason to upgrade.

I think the newest CPU in my house is either my Steam Deck's APU or the one in my PS5.

Both the PS5 and Steam deck's CPU architecture are Zen2. So the 5950X is the most modern (Zen3)

I'm considering it, but only just, my 5800x is good enough for most gaming, which is GPU bound anyway, and I run a dual xeon rig for my workstation.

zen 2-4 took care of a lot of the demand, we all have 8-16 cores now, what else could they give us?

I have a 5900x and honestly don't see any need for an upgrade anytime soon.
A new CPU would maybe give me like 10 fps more in games, but a new GPU would do more. And I don't think the CPU will be a bottle neck in the next few years
- Even beyond that, short of something like blender, Windows just can't handle that kind of horsepower, it's not designed for it and the UI bogs down fairly fast.
  Linux, otoh, I find can eat as much CPU as you throw at it, but often many graphics applications start bogging down the X server for me.
  So I have a windows machine with the best GPU but passable cpu and a decent workstation gpu with insane cpu power on linux.
They do still seem to be making advances in single-core performance, but whether it matters to most people is a different question. Most people aren't using software that would benefit that much from these generation-to-generation performance improvements. It's not going to be anywhere near as noticeable as when we went from 2 or 4 cores to 8, 16, 24, etc.
- Single-thread is really hard, we've basically saturated our l1 working set size, adding more doesn't help much. Trying to extend the vector length just makes physical design harder and that reduces clock speed. The predictors are pretty good, and Apple finally kicked everyone up the ass to increase OOO like they should have.
  Also, software still kind of sucks. It's better than it was, but we need to improve it, the bloat is just barely being handled by silicon gains.
  Flash was the epochal change, maybe we have some new form of hybrid storage but that doesn't seem likely right now, Apple might do it to cut costs while preserving performance, actually yeah I see them trying to have their cake and eat it too.
  Otherwise I don't know, we need a better way to deal with GPUs, there's nothing else that can move the needle, except true heterogenous core clusters, but I haven't been able to sell that to anyone so far, they all think it's a great idea, that someone else should do.
what else could they give us?
AI!!!!!!!!
^^/s

It is not an upgrade over the 7800X3D.

I thought about an upgrade for a minute from my 3700X, but I realized none of the games I play or programs I use are demanding on CPU enough that it would make any real difference in my experience.

Games have kind of stalled out for me too, I haven't played a AAA game in years it feels like, and the other games I do play are not that demanding on modern hardware.

I would also need to upgrade to DDR5 RAM which is just more cost for a marginal upgrade.

I'm in the same boat.
Have the 3600 with a 1050ti (!), and its does a good job when I play the 2-3 games I like to play. 32gb for my apps and docker containers. Plenty.
I see no reason to upgrade.
It has always been like this for me. Sticked to a platform until it died and never upgraded (OK ram maybe) until I was forced to.
Same here. I have a 3600X with 32GB RAM and a 3070ti. I see no sense in upgrading for a performance boost that I have no need for. I mostly play indie games and AA Titles. And even graphically heavier hitters like Space Marine 2, Wukong and The First Descendant run fine on 3440x1440.
Before Playstation 6 and Xbox Series X MK. 2 Y Type Z (or whatever MS will name that) i don't think there will be a significant need to upgrade.
Most of the flag ship titles of this generation run perfectly playable on most mid tier gaming PCs and laptops. And the PC handheld market is also cutting into the traditional PC gamer market as well. Things like the steam deck, legion go or ally x all have taken away a share of people that would have usually bought an upgrade by now.
You can also buy a used 5xxx CPU and drop it into your current board. They aren’t terribly expensive on the used market. Check out the 5600 and 5600X.
Just make sure you update your bios first. A bunch of boards need it to run 5xxx chips.

The thing is the 7800x3d is a gem of a CPU. It's has more compute than I could use and it's low power and runs cool.

I'm going to run it until I can't anymore, and I'll continue to upgrade around the AMD ecosystem unless they stop being awesome.

I’ve run a 7800X3D - I wouldn’t say it runs cool; my 5800X3D did but the 7800 seems to just run as much as it can until it’s under the temp ceiling, favouring performance over temp.

Would have to buy new board and RAM, not really worth it performance-wise, at least not for me. Some day, yes, but that day hasn't come and will definitely be after a GPU upgrade.

I'll probably get one, once enough of its vulnerabilities are discovered and post-mitigation benchmarks are released.
And once I have enough money.

money.... chip I have in my rig right now is so expensive, I would need to save up for at least a year. its not broken so the money can be used on other things.
the capitolists are almost at the end of the of hungry hungry hippos game played with the world's money.
- Mine is pretty expensive too (at least for me, it is). I just make sure not to fly without a rebuy.

I'm waiting on the new X870 chipset boards to come out. Why buy an old board with a new processor?

I got an 5800x3d and 64gb of ddr4. I see no need to jump up to a new CPU and invest in ddr5 memory yet. The performance benefit is only a few percent just isn't worth the upgrade in my opinion

My 3700X is still working fine for me.

Price drop put the 7900x at bargain bin prices and I bought that instead.

Two words: Microsoft Pluton.

Aaaaint touching that shit.

Oh gosh. Forgot all about that shit. No thanks.
Do AMD not realise that Linux/Privacy nerds stuck with them regardless for years. Would they have survived without that loyalty?

I think I am going to be one of the people buying into Zen 5 but mainly for the longevity of the platform aspect. I'm in the preplanning stage of my next ProxMox server that will be my NAS (unRAID VM), local infrastructure (Samba AD, Adguard, etc.) & Gaming PC via Parsec/Moonlight or plugged directly into the PC with GPU/NVME passthrough to a VM for gaming.

Firewall is on a separate ProxMox host so if the ProxMox host needs a reboot internet will be fine.

I wouldn't say nobody, but most people with a working Zen 4 don't see the need.

And they're the only people who can easily do it.
Anybody else needs a new motherboard and RAM. And for those people, they're like "hmmm I can spend $700+ upgrading to Zen5, or I could spend $180 on a 5700X3D, not have to pull my entire PC apart, and get about the same real-world performance because I'll be GPU bottlenecked anyway."

I bought a 7800x3d, so I'm not in the market for a new CPU for years to come. If I hadn't already bought it, I'd buy it now.

Same! I went from a 2700x to the 7800x3d. I'll probably upgrade in 4-7 years depending on my financial situation and the specs for new hardware.
Ditto. 7800X3D is a beast for games and I don't give half a shit about productivity performance on my gaming machine. I got mine for around $350 early this year and I'm absolutely floored that it's now over $400. That's not the direction things are supposed to go.
I think we may be in the last generations of x86's desktop and laptop dominance. All phones and now all Macs run on ARM-based chips and they do just fine while sipping watts, compared to x86's two big proponents both having faltering launches on their latest generations with ever higher TDPs where you only get more processing power by using more electrical power.

Why would I downgrade from my 7000x3d chip

Price is probably #1.

Bit of speculation here with no real sources ; There was a boom in late 2022 through 2023 when people could finally reliably get parts again. I'm guessing many who wanted to upgrade already did in the past 2 years. Anyone who got a new computer in 2020 onward should be fine for at least a few more years. I think the average is around 7 years.

The market will probably see a surge between 2027-2030 as people begin replacing their "covid era" computers.The market right now is mainly seeing anyone with a pre-covid computer who bought a nice top of line machine for about 1k. They're looking at current pricing and choosing to go with today's mid-low teir, which will outclass their old 201x top of the line computer.

Another factor could be AAA gaming hasn't exactly been pumping out hit new tiles the last 5 years. People who wanted to play cyberpunk or Eldon ring already upgraded by the time Wukon came out.

With less new games requirng the latest and greatest means the need to upgrade is going drop too.

Again all speculation....

I'm currently in the market for a new CPU for my PC, so I did my research and I'm not going to buy a Zen 5 CPU either. The reason is simple: The Zen 4 X3D CPUs are faster. Because of that, everyone who wants a new CPU now is getting the Zen 4 X3Ds and everyone who can wait, is waiting for the Zen 5 X3Ds. There's no point in getting the Zen 5 CPUs that are currently out.

Edit: Actually, after reading the top reply, I'm not sure anymore if the Zen 5s aren't the better choice after all

I'm still using a i7-3630QM and a R5-1600.

They are both enough for what I do with them. Why would I upgrade?

What are you using your computer for?? Just web browsing or something‽ I just upgraded from an i5-6600k/1060 setup and for like the past year and some change I've been hitting 100% CPU usage with just a few programs open, not even gaming lol
And that was with a CPU 3 generations newer lmao
- Gaming, working (data processing, physical modelling).
  The trick is to use a lower overhead OS than Windows.
- Sounds like some bad software or something extra CPU intensive then. I use R5 2600 on W11 and it can handle everything I need with ease like web browsing (depending on pages and tab count it can be quite demanding), at least 3 VMs at the same time (2 Windows, 1 Linux), gaming, video transcoding. All that is not happening at the same time, but I can't remember last time I checked Task Manager to see what is using my CPU.

For me, it's because:

I have a 5950X and it seems pointless to upgrade from there. Sure the new stuff is faster, but disproportionately so for the price. I would need to replace a bunch of components.
I recently upgraded to 128GB RAM, and it was cheaper to do that with DDR4
I've had 2 faulty Ryzen processors (1700X, then my first 5950X), and I've learned to wait until the kinks are ironed out.

Out for curiosity, why do you need 128gb of ram?
- As of yet, I don't. But the idea is I eventually move my VM/container host back to my more powerful desktop machine. It also runs Gentoo, so now I can build everything in RAM, even large packages like Firefox, without having to close other programs.

I just built a computer, and honestly I didn't need much more CPU than the Ryzen 3600 from my old one. CPUs don't go obsolete the way they used to.

I went with a 7000 series pretty much entirely because my new motherboard said "Compatible with 7000 series. Compatible with 9000 series with a BIOS update." And I didn't want to bother with having to get a loaner 7000 series to do a BIOS update, then swap CPUs.

$$$$

Still rocking an i5-8400 and a 1060. It's fine for FFXIV and most other games.

Until GPU prices come down, the CPU is the least of my worries. I'll play anything that needs decent hardware on my PS5.

GPU prices have come down havent they?

Let's see... seems like i can upgrade my Asus PRIME X70-A to a Ryzen 9 5950X for about 300€... interesting...

The 5950X is now pretty midrange when it comes to some desktop benchmarks, but mine is still serving me well and I don't feel I'm hitting the limits of the CPU. If I were shopping now I'd certainly find that price appealing for what it offers. I'm not considering Intel these days, but the price premium on latest-generation AMD CPUs is high.
- It's one of the latest my mobo can handle AFAIK, and i like to maximize my hardware for longevity (one of the reasons i prefer AMD over Intel, their CPU generations span multiple sockets).
  Also, not a gamer.

I don't need one right now and seeing how development slowed down won't need one in the foreseeable future

I am still running an FX-8320 and it’s fast enough for everything that I need it for. It baffles me to see people arguing about the differences between different Ryzen CPUs.

If you're not running the latest games it really doesn't matter at all.
Some people use computers for more demanding things. For anyone who just uses the computer for web browsing, email and watching videos, anything but the most feeble machine from the past decade or more will be fine.

I'm not downgrading from my 4770 for that!

as someone who upgraded from a 4770k to a ryzen 3900x, you're kidding yourself if you really think your chip is superior. Makes for a decent truenas server though.
- Oh I was absolutely joking. I'm on the struggle bus with that machine. That's the kids "plug in an Xbox controller and play" machine. It sits in their room. I use a MSI stealth 8750h and 1060 -Mint, as my main machine. I know it's not the newest but it's fine for what I do.

Who TF is Ryen?