If you were hoping to get your hands on the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X, the latest flagship processor from AMD, you might need to brace yourself for spending a ton of cash – or at least wait for stocks to replenish.
Right now in the US, the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X is sold out pretty much everywhere. Pretty much every retailer is sold out of the chip, including Amazon, Best Buy, Newegg – which doesn't even have it listed for sale – and Micro Center. Even on AMD's own website, the Ryzen 9 3900X is out of stock.
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However, if you are feeling particularly brave, you can find the processor on eBay, though you won't be able to find it at the MSRP. Instead, you can expect to pay around $700 (about £560, AU$995). We were able to find the processor used on eBay for less than that, but it's still $100 higher than retail price, at $600 (about £480, AU$850).
So, we went ahead and looked at retailers in the UK and Australia to see if availability was any better. If you're in the UK, you should be able to 'pre-order' the chip on Amazon, Scan or Overclockers, though it will take at least a month to arrive at your door.
And, in Australia, you can preorder the chip at PLE, but the Ryzen 9 3900X apparently doesn't even exist on Amazon. And, on mWave, the processor is unavailable for purchase, with an option to be notified as availability improves.
Where are all the processors?
In our review, the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X absolutely destroyed the competition, delivering a multi-core GeekBench score around 25% faster than the Intel Core i9-9900K at the same price point. So, obviously that's going to create some demand.
However, likely contributing to this supply issue is the fact that this is a 12-core mainstream processor, so it's likely that there are a decent amount of chips that don't make it past the internal testing phase – but that's just pure speculation on our part.
At the end of the day, this is pretty standard for a new processor release. Late in 2018, Intel was facing some well-publicized supply issues of its own, to the point where analysts were claiming the Santa Clara tech giant was dragging down PC sales.
We don't know whether or not this AMD Ryzen 3rd Generation shortage will be as bad, but AMD does say that it's "providing significant product volumes to our retail and e-tail partners", according to a report from PCWorld, so it could just be that everyone's trying to get their hands on this high-end processor at the same time.
Either way, we'll see how this Ryzen availability news story plays out over the next few weeks, and hopefully everyone that wants to slap one of these chips into their rigs will be able to in time.
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