The Club386 team dropped in to see AMD while we were roaming Computex 2026, and after a good natter with senior technical marketing manager, Donny Woligroski, we came away glad that this veteran chipmaker hasn’t completely forgotten PC gamers.
These are undoubtedly strange times for hardware enthusiasts, and in previous years, I’d have been champing at the bit for some brand-new gaming CPU tech. As such, in some ways, it looks a bit rubbish that one of AMD’s biggest Computex 2026 announcements was that it’s resurrecting a four-year-old CPU. In a world where DDR5 RAM prices are downright silly, though, this was exactly what I wanted. I even called for AMD to bring back the 5800X3D back at the end of 2025.
Respinning the 5800X3D
Woligroski told us this wasn’t an easy task. The 5800X3D has been out of production for a while now, and he said the chip needed to be entirely respun (re-engineered) for mass fabrication. It’s still the same chip, right down to the OPN (part number) on the heatspreader, but AMD has clearly taken this rerelease very seriously. Producing 5800X3D means there’s a real opportunity cost of not building, for example, high-margin Epycs on AMD’s TSMC wafer allocation.
It knows there’s a huge ecosystem of AM4 users who now can’t afford to upgrade to AM5 systems, as DDR5 RAM is so ludicrously expensive. With the 5800X3D, however, these gamers can keep their existing DDR4 RAM and just drop this CPU into their motherboard. It even comes with a carbon nanotube thermal pad in the box, so you can strap your cooler to it without worrying about reapplying paste a couple of years down the line.
This isn’t AMD just finding some old Zen 3 stock and reselling it – the company has invested in refabricating it, at considerable cost. You don’t do that if you’re only planning a limited production run – it simply isn’t worth the resources. That means this CPU is likely to be produced at a large scale, and naturally, some of these chips won’t quite make the grade. Does that mean we might see more X3D chips in the future?
Unsurprisingly, Woligroski couldn’t say either way, but given what AMD has poured into this rerelease so far, I’d be very surprised if the 5800X3D is the last AM4 X3D rerelease we see. Otherwise, what’s going to happen to all the samples that can’t clock as high as the 5800X3D, or where a couple of cores don’t work properly? Making a wider lineup of CPUs just makes sense in terms of efficiency. I’d be surprised if we didn’t see the 5700X3D making a similar return. Heck, maybe there will be some golden samples that can clock higher, paving the way for a 5900X3D.
Meet the Ryzen 7 7700X3D
It’s this production efficiency that’s very probably led to AMD’s other CPU announcement at Computex, the Ryzen 7 7700X3D (pictured in my hand above). Again, this isn’t new tech – it’s based on AMD’s last-gen Zen 4 architecture. The Ryzen 7 9800X3D and 9850X3D are selling well, even at their high prices, but there’s clearly a market for cheaper chips equipped with 3D V-Cache, especially when you now have to spend so much of your budget on DDR5 RAM and storage.
That’s why AMD is still selling its cheaper, last-gen 7800X3Ds by the bucketload (it’s #3 on Amazon UK’s CPU top sellers chart). There will be some chips that don’t quite make the grade on AMD’s production line, but can function well enough at 4.5GHz rather than 5GHz, and hey presto, there’s the 7700X3D, which AMD can sell for $330. That’s admittedly not a great price when you can pick up a 7800X3D for $338 anyway, but hopefully the 7700X3D’s real-world price will be lower.
What I really liked to see, though, was that AMD’s still serious about gaming hardware. Yes, this is old tech, and the MSRPs could be more generous, but in general, AMD’s response is good for PC gaming hardware enthusiasts in this warped market.
We all know AMD could have put these consumer-focused resources into datacentre-specific AI tech instead and made much more money. There’s really no business reason why AMD had to rerelease an AM4 chip to give owners of old motherboards an upgrade path, but it did it anyway. That’s just what we needed in these bleak times for PC gaming hardware, and hats off to AMD for doing it.
