AMD's new Ryzen 7000-series processors are now available to buy

(Image credit: Future)

AMD's excellent Ryzen 7000-series processors are now available to buy from your local computer shop and online retailers. Just yesterday our Ryzen 9 7950X review and Ryzen 7 7700X review were set live, and if those whet your appetite for either processor, or the Ryzen 5 7600X or Ryzen 9 7900X, then you'll want to hop online immediately to secure one for yourself.

At least supply shouldn't be so much of a sticky topic for these new Zen 4 processors—supply for CPUs has been pretty stable this past year. However, even during the best of times we can see in-demand processors sell out rapidly at launch. The Ryzen 9 5950X and 5900X were particularly hard to acquire from the previous generation, and it's likely that their high-end counterparts in the Ryzen 7000-series will be in similarly high demand.

But you shouldn't have a hard time spotting these chips. They come with brand new and very flashy black packaging that sets them apart from the older Zen 2 and Zen 3 chips.

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If you are planning on picking up one of these processors today, be sure to pick up a compatible AM5 motherboard to go with it. Unlike the previous generations of Ryzen processor, the new Ryzen 7000-series chips require a brand new LGA socket. That means a whole new motherboard and new RAM. These chips only support DDR5, so you need to pick up a couple of sticks of that, too.

But you'll be rewarded with fantastic gaming performance and serious multithreaded chops for your money. While we haven't yet seen everything that AMD's competition can muster in Intel Raptor Lake, we found AMD's new processors to offer an impressive uplift in performance over Zen 3 chips and deliver plenty of gusto for gaming. They're also excellent in Eco-Mode, which makes these chips seriously efficient.

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Jacob earned his first byline writing for his own tech blog, before graduating into breaking things professionally at PCGamesN. Now he's managing editor of the hardware team at PC Gamer, and you'll usually find him testing the latest components or building a gaming PC.