9950X3D out of stock at Newegg.
9950X3D out of stock at Newegg.
AMD's new gaming and productivity king, the Ryzen 9950X3D, launched yesterday to rave reviews and incredible hype in the wider PC enthusiast community. But like the latest graphics cards from both AMD and Nvidia, the Ryzen 9950X3D didn't stay in stock for long. Despite initially being available across a range of sites and retailers, the 9950X3D is already out of stock everywhere we looked.
The Ryzen 9000 series of Zen 5 CPUs wasn't AMD's most exciting generation of chips, but they offered solid gains on their predecessors when they launched in late 2024. The 9800X3D cemented AMD's position as gaming king, too, keeping Intel locked out of that contest for another generation. But it's only now, over six months after the debut of the Ryzen 9000-series, that AMD has expanded its X3D offerings to the high-end. In so doing, it both replaced the 7950X3D as the top do-it-all AMD CPU and made it better than ever before.
But that's no good to anyone if the CPUs aren't in stock for anyone to buy. At the time of this writing, the listings for the new chip at Amazon, Newegg, B&H Photo, Micro Center, and Best Buy all have it as out of stock. The 12-core 9900X3D is similarly out of stock, and even the motherboard+CPU bundles of dubious value on Newegg are out of stock.
The only place we could find the 9950X3D at all was in this $5,000+ Skytech gaming PC at Walmart. It's not something I'd recommend buying at that price, but if you really, really want that CPU and everything that comes with it, it's there.
9950X3D bundles out of stock at Newegg.
9950X3D bundles out of stock at Newegg.
Credit: Newegg
But you almost certainly don't need to. It's fair to say that the 9950X3D is a niche CPU, despite its incredible versatility. Most gamers will be better off with a more affordable and occasionally more capable 9800X3D. It offers everything the 9950X3D does in gaming and is still plenty capable of demanding workloads outside of that for most users. Creative types who don't game don't need the 3D V-Cache, so they would be better off the more affordable 9950X or one of Intel's new Core Ultra 200 models with their boatloads of cores.
It's only the gaming streamers and those who want to work on a high-end machine and then game on the same PC in the off-hours who this CPU is really designed for. For them, it's amazing. And likely will be for an expanded group of them when it comes back in stock.
But it sure would be nice if new hardware could drop without immediately disappearing.