There’s plenty of hype surrounding the launch of AMD’s new Zen 5 Ryzen 9000 CPUs, but with the company having just pushed back the launch of the chips by a couple of weeks, those that were primed to push the order button might be getting itchy trigger fingers. If that’s the case, you may be pleased to find there’s a way to at least reserve your AMD Ryzen 9000 order right now, but it does require you to live in China…
Yes, if you head on over to the Chinese store JD.com, you can save your order space for what are expected to be some of the new best gaming CPUs by reserving one of these new AMD CPUs. And, in fact, if you order either the 9600X or 9700X, these come with a free Once Human-themed CPU cooler.
The key aspect to note about the reservation system in place on the site, other than it being for China residents only, is that there’s no pricing yet, so you’re not actually pre-ordering it. You’re simply reserving your opportunity to buy the CPU when it becomes available.
It’s an interesting system, and we can’t help but wonder if it could have a place in future product launches in other parts of the world. Could it perhaps reduce the impact of scalpers when it comes to highly sought-after releases, or might it make the situation even worse? We’ll leave you to mull that one over.
The Ryzen 9000 series is AMD’s upcoming range of new CPUs based on its new Zen 5 architecture, with the first batch of processors consisting of the Ryzen 9 9950X, Ryzen 9 9900X, Ryzen 7 9700X, and Ryzen 5 9600X. These range from having 16 cores down to six cores, with AMD’s architecture allowing for each of these cores to deal with two application threads at a time, so they appear as 32-core down to 12-core chips to Windows.
The original AMD Ryzen 9000 release date was set for July 31, but at the last minute, AMD pushed this back due to it discovering some errors in the first batch of CPUs it sent out. The revised AMD Ryzen 9000 release date is now in August, with the bottom two CPUs coming out on August 8, and the top two following on August 15.
That release schedule is in reverse order to what we normally expect, with companies tending to release their flagship product first, but there’s only a week between the launches, so you won’t have long to wait if all you care about is getting the fastest chip.
For more on what we expect from AMD’s Zen 5 processors, check out our Zen 5 guide for all the details we have so far.