Thousands upon thousands of AMD Ryzen 5000 CPUs are flooding into retail pre-Christmas

AMD Zen 3
(Image credit: AMD)

UK Online retailer, Scan Computers International, has updated its AMD Ryzen 5000 Series status page with expected delivery dates and quantities for AMD's latest Zen 3 chips. And it makes for some interesting reading. It's all presented in a reasonably easy to parse table, that includes the number of outstanding pre-orders for the chips as well as how many chips it is expecting in the runup to Christmas.

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Of the four chips that AMD has released so far, the excellent AMD Ryzen 9 5900X is the chip that has the most outstanding pre-orders, at 989 chips. Not bad for a chip that costs $549, which seems to translate to around £510 in local money, depending on who you actually buy it from. The other chip that really impressed me was the AMD Ryzen 5 5600X, which only has 127 pre-orders to battle though before we're going to see it appearing in the shop to actually buy.

Where things get interesting with Scan's expected deliveries is the quantities involved—something we very rarely get any visibility of. A reasonable number of chips are landing this side of Christmas and then a healthy load just before the end of the year. Scan is looking at taking receipt of 2,457 chips between now and Christmas week, with another 4,190 CPU due the following week. Over 6,500 chips in total. That's a lot of chips.

If all goes to plan, that should see the pre-orders settled before the end of the year, with Ryzen 5 5600Xs being available to buy in Christmas week, with another big allotment dropping the following week. 

If you've been waiting to build that next-gen PC, this all looks like good news—you really may not have to wait too much longer. Hopefully, you managed to pick up a few of the other components you need in the Black Friday sales, but if not, it might be worth piecing together a few things now. Don't forget you'll need a cooler if you get a 5800X, 5900X or 5950X.

In other news, Asus RoG UK has taken to Twitter to announce that stock is continuing to be replenished across all of its RTX 30-series cards, but with a focus on the Nvidia RTX 3070 this month:

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If Asus has more stock on the way, you've got to assume that the other manufacturers will be getting some love from Nvidia as well. 

This year has been… let's say interesting, but who could have guessed that PC components were going to be in such high demand that we'd be waiting for stock to actually upgrade our machines. If enough stock gets to the retailers before New Year parties begin, we can put all of this behind us and joke about it in a few years time. You know, when the frustrating has abated.

Alan Dexter

Alan has been writing about PC tech since before 3D graphics cards existed, and still vividly recalls having to fight with MS-DOS just to get games to load. He fondly remembers the killer combo of a Matrox Millenium and 3dfx Voodoo, and seeing Lara Croft in 3D for the first time. He's very glad hardware has advanced as much as it has though, and is particularly happy when putting the latest M.2 NVMe SSDs, AMD processors, and laptops through their paces. He has a long-lasting Magic: The Gathering obsession but limits this to MTG Arena these days.