As shown during its official presentation at the end of August, the top-dog CPU of AMD’s new Ryzen 7000 Series is set to be the Ryzen 9 7950X, and slated for availability from 27 September onwards. For those of you who are impatient and want to own that silicon, though, you may be happy to know that the CPU has supposedly already gone on sale in China.
Apparently but unsurprisingly, the 7950X is already up for grabs via Taobao’s mobile retail platform, Goofish. As a quick primer, the platform is known locally as both a second-hand and black market site, where sellers can often be found selling the engineering samples of Intel CPU, well ahead of the launch. Of course, being what they are, the engineering samples can often be a far cry from the finished product. Case in point, there’s the supposed engineering sample of a 13900K that went on sale there, back in June.
Fast forward to today and, again, it’s the 7950X that is being sold at an asking price of 5999 RMB (~RM3898), which seems a tad bit steeper than AMD’s SRP of US$699 (~RM3185) for it. Having said that, pulling the trigger to get this unit wouldn’t do much good for its future owner at this point, at least not for another week. Firstly, AMD will be launching both the Ryzen 7000 series and its corresponding 600 series motherboards in tandem; that means vendors and retailers that already ordered their own batches may offer a better deal and pricing through a bundle deal.
For another matter, it’s not as though early owners of this 7950X unit would be able to use it without AMD’s official driver support for it. Those usually only become available as a Day-1 update and more often than not, new owners will be required to update the BIOS on their respective X670 motherboards. Then there’s the matter of its warranty; because this is clearly an “unofficial” unit, it’s very unlikely that whoever own this CPU will be able to RMA it, should something go awry with it.
The AMD Ryzen 9 7950X is the successor to the CPU maker’s previous generation flagship, the 5950X. Specs-wise, it is based on the latest 5nm Zen4 architecture, has a 16-core, 32-thread design, a base and boost clock of 4.5GHz and 5.7GHz, respectively, as well as a TDP of 170W.
(Source: Goofish via Videocardz)
