New AMD Ryzen gaming CPUs are coming for your old motherboard, says leak

With new Ryzen 5 5600XT, Ryzen 5 5600, and Ryzen 3 5300G chips, AMD is reportedly continuing support for its seven-year-old AM4 platform.

Owners of old AMD AM4 motherboards appear to have been given yet another upgrade option, despite AMD now being two generations into its newer AM5 socket, with the arrival of the Ryzen 5 5600XT, Ryzen 5 5600, and Ryzen 3 5300G. Although not officially unveiled yet, the new AMD Ryzen chips have appeared in motherboard CPU support listings and other leaks, showing that AMD is set to continue supplying new AM4 gaming CPUs for a while yet.

What’s particularly surprising about the apparently imminent arrival of new AMD AM4 CPUs is that the supply of some AM4 chips, such as the previous best gaming CPU entrant, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, appears to be drying up. So while plenty of CPU options remain for owners of AM4 motherboards, it’s still surprising to see even more brand-new models announced.

The new CPUs reportedly offer a range of performance output, with the Ryzen 5 5600XT expected to offer six cores (12 threads) with a base clock of 3.8GHz. The Ryzen 5 5600T then reportedly also has six cores but a base clock of 3.5GHz. Meanwhile, the Ryzen 3 5300G is expected to be just a quad-core chip with Radeon Vega graphics.

None of these chips, then, are likely to be challenging more recent AMD and Intel models for gaming supremacy. However, if you still own an AM4 motherboard with DDR4 RAM and have an older, pre-5000 series Ryzen CPU, then a chip such as the 5600XT could be a decent, affordable upgrade.

That said, for peak gaming performance you’d be much better off with the Ryzen 7 5700X3D, which itself was only announced earlier this year. At a price of under $200 for an eight-core chip equipped with AMD’s 3D V-Cache tech, it’s the clear choice here.

Back to these new CPUs, their arrival has been indicated by both a social media source and by the names of these products appearing on motherboard manufacturers’ websites. The former comes via regular X (formerly Twitter) leaker @momomo_us, who posted the names of these chips along with specs for the 5600 variants.

Further investigation by Wccftech revealed that both Asus and MSI have updated motherboard CPU compatibility lists to include these CPUs. Other manufacturers, such as ASRock and Gigabyte, haven’t done the same yet but, while this is technically still in the realms of rumor, the arrival of these chips does seem very likely. There’s no indication of these CPUs’ release date or price, but we would expect them to be here before the end of the year.

If you’re actually considering upgrading your system from AM4 to AM5, check out our best gaming RAM guide to find the best memory to use with your new PC, as you’ll need to upgrade to DDR5 memory as well.