AMD Ryzen 9 7950X 16-Core Retail CPU Already Being Sold In China For $850 US

We are a week away from the launch of the AMD Ryzen 7000 CPUs but the flagship Ryzen 9 7950X is already being sold in China.

The AMD Ryzen 9 7950X was listed at Goofish, a 3rd party Chinese retail outlet where users can also sell second-hand items. The chip that's been listed over at the site is a retail sample & not an engineering sample like the one that was leaked a while back. The CPU shown has the OPN code "100-000000514" and comes with the same IHS and contact pads as we have seen in several CPU renders for the Zen 4 lineup. The CPU is said to be working 100% fine and runs perfectly like any other Ryzen 7000 retail chip on the AM5 platform.

About pricing, the lister is asking for 5999 RMB or $856 USD for the chip which is quite a hefty price considering the retail chip which will be available just a week later has a price of $699 US (MSRP). As such, we would advise our readers to not buy this chip and wait for a week to get a chip at MSRP as that's the best way to go. Furthermore, buying this listed chip would mean that you won't get any sort of warranty.

The AMD Ryzen 9 7950X retains its healthy 16-core and 32-thread count from the previous two generations. The CPU will feature an impressive base frequency of 4.5 GHz and a boost clock of up to 5.7 GHz (5.85 GHz F-Max) which should make it 200 MHz faster than Intel's Alder Lake Core i9-12900KS which has a boost frequency of 5.5 GHz on a single-core. The CPU can also hit a peak or max frequency of 5.85 GHz but will require some serious cooling as detailed here.

The flagship is going to cost $699 US which means that it will be priced slightly higher than the Core i9-12900K while offering a significant performance leap in multi-threading apps such as Chaos V-Ray of up to +57% and doing so with up to 47% higher energy efficiency.

In terms of gaming performance, the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X will be offering up to 35% higher uplift in games such as Shadow of The Tomb Raider versus the Core i9-12900K.

AMD also showcased the performance of the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X against the Intel Core i9-12900K in both gaming and content creation tasks. The CPU was anywhere from -1% to +23% faster in the gaming benchmarks and +36 to +62% faster in creation workloads.

The AMD Ryzen 9 7950X along with the rest of the Ryzen 7000 CPU family and the AM5 platform are scheduled for launch next week on the 27th of September.