AMD Ryzen 5 7500X3D debuts in Micro Center pre-built PC — affordable gaming CPU seemingly exclusive to retailer for now

Micro Center just launched a brand-new gaming PC featuring the new AMD Ryzen 5 7500X3D. The 7500X3D is seemingly the most affordable X3D chip from the Ryzen 7000 series, and, at the moment, it’s only available on the retailer’s PowerSpec line of pre-builts starting at around $899.99, as reported by PC World. At this price, you get the PowerSpec G528 gaming PC, which pairs the processors with an RTX 5060 8GB GPU, 16GB of DDR5-6000 memory, and a 1TB SSD. If you spend an extra $100, you could get the same chip in the PowerSpec G527 with a more powerful Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB graphics card and double the RAM at 32GB.

This entry-level gaming processor has almost the same specifications as the AMD Ryzen 5 7600X3D, which was launched last year, also as an exclusive. It has the same 6 cores and 12 threads, and, of course, the 96MB of L3 cache, although it has a slightly lower clock speed of 4.0 GHz (versus the 4.1 GHz of the older chip).

Despite that, it has the same performance as the AMD Ryzen 5 7600X3D, making it a no-brainer choice for those who want a new gaming PC on a budget. We’re unsure if AMD will follow the same route and offer the affordable chip as a boxed unit to other retailers or even outside of the U.S., although the chip maker eventually released the older 7600X3D to the rest of the world a few weeks after its initial rollout with Micro Center.

Even though the latest Ryzen 9000 series CPUs launched in July 2024, with their X3D variants arriving later in November, Team Red still keeps on releasing new processors on its older Zen 3 and Zen 4 platforms, allowing systems that have been around for a decade to upgrade to newer, more modern chips without the need to replace the motherboard. Although this may sound counterintuitive to most PC enthusiasts, this strategy allows the company to compete in the budget end of the market, and is likely one of the reasons it has closed the gap with Intel.

Micro Center offers a lot of value for these two gaming pre-builts, especially when compared to other offerings at a similar price. For example, the PowerSpec B737, which goes for the same $899.99 price, doesn’t come with a discrete GPU, although it has double the memory and a Ryzen CPU with a higher clock speed (but not an X3D chip). On the other hand, the $999.99 PowerSpec B946 also doesn’t come with a graphics card, although it has a relatively potent Intel Core i9-12900K.

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