AMD has confirmed to Club386 that it’s having a good look at its AM4 platform, as the price of PC memory continues to skyrocket into the next galaxy along. Many people, including us, have asked AMD to consider bringing back 5800X3D, and we took the opportunity to ask the company about it in a roundtable meeting at CES 2026.
‘There’s nothing to announce,’ AMD PR manager Matthew Hurwitz told us, ‘but given the current circumstances, we’re definitely looking at things we can do with AM4.’ AMD’s Josh Hort, senior director and head of ISV enabling for computing & graphics, also added that ‘we’re always evaluating the roadmap, right? Whether it’s bringing back 5800, or the 5000-series X3D products, to help fill a gap.’
While DDR4 memory prices have gone up, this older RAM also has a very large existing install base. If you can reuse your existing memory, then that cuts out a massive chunk of the cost of a CPU upgrade. AMD’s latest AM5 platform, as well as Intel’s LGA1851 kit, all require DDR5 memory, adding a substantial extra cost if you just want a new CPU. In the meantime, prices for AMD’s discontinued 5800X3D chips are accelerating on eBay, as gamers with old RAM look to get a new CPU.
Will we be looking at brand-new AM4 products, or a reintroduction of old ones? Earlier at CES 2026, AMD’s VP & GM of Ryzen CPU and Radeon graphics, David McAfee, told Tom’s Hardware that AMD is ‘certainly looking at everything that [it] can do to bring more supply and kind of reintroduce products back into the [AM4] ecosystem,’ and this suggests the latter. Could we see a return of the acclaimed Ryzen 7 5800X3D? The best we could get out of Matthew Hurwitz was that ‘it’s not a no,’ but that also doesn’t mean it’s a yes.
There’s scope for AMD to go even further than Ryzen 7 5800X3D here, as this chip did have a notably low boost clock speed of just 4.5GHz – a good 1.1GHz behind the latest Ryzen 7 9850X3D. How about a Zen 3 X3D chip with an even higher clock speed, perhaps called the 5850X3D? When DDR5 prices are so exclusively high, gamers will be reluctant to move to AM5 just to get a higher clock speed – there’s a real gap in the market here.
Either way, this looks like a space to watch. Let’s hope AMD comes up with the goods, opening up a decent CPU upgrade path to DDR4 owners again.
