AMD’s new desktop CPUs, the Ryzen 5000 series, will start arriving on Nov. 5 with the goal of offering the best PC gaming performance.

The main improvements involve the Zen 3 architecture, which is designed to boost the max clock speeds and increase the instructions per clock by 19 percent. The layout on the Ryzen chips has also been redesigned so that the cores have direct access to the L3 cache for lower latency, enabling faster PC gaming.

“Zen 3 increases our overall lead in performance,” said AMD CEO Lisa Su during a Thursday event. “It increases our lead in power efficiency, and also now it delivers the best single-threaded performance and gaming performance as well.”

The Ryzen 5000 family will first arrive in four processors:

  • The Ryzen 9 5950X: a 16-core, 32-thread chip for $799
  • The Ryzen 9 5900X: a 12-core, 24-thread chip for $549
  • The Ryzen 7 5800X: a 8-core, 16-thread chip for $449
  • The Ryzen 5600X: a 6-core, 12-thread chip for $299


PC Magazine