The wait is officially over for Zen 4.
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.
For the time being, Best Buy has the Ryzen 9 7950X, Ryzen 9 7900X, Ryzen 7 7700X, and Ryzen 5 7600X all in stock and at their respective MSRPs. Excellent.
Newegg also has similar listings for the Ryzen 9 7950X, Ryzen 9 7900X, Ryzen 7 7700X, and Ryzen 5 7600X.
I have yet to find any of the new chips on Amazon US yet, however, and Micro Center only offers these CPUs for in-store pickup.
In the UK, Overclockers has the entire line-up in stock and ready to go. As does Scan.
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.
Best CPU for gaming: The top chips from Intel and AMD
Best gaming motherboard: The right boards
Best graphics card: Your perfect pixel-pusher awaits
Best SSD for gaming: Get into the game ahead of the rest
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.
