Everyone’s getting ready for AMD Ryzen to debut. Manufacturers are releasing motherboard compatible with the new CPUs, AMD is steadily releasing more information about the processors, and now consumers have pre-ordered enough Ryzen chips to push them to the top of Amazon’s best sellers list.
The Ryzen 7 1700X, Ryzen 7 1800X, and Ryzen 7 1700 are currently in the first, third, and fourth spots of Amazon’s list of best-selling CPUs, respectively. Intel’s 7th generation (Kaby Lake) i7-7700K and the 6th generation (Skylake) Intel Core i7 6700K 4.00 GHz occupy the second and fifth spots on the list.
That isn’t bad, considering that AMD opened Ryzen pre-orders yesterday, and nobody’s been able to independently test the processors yet. That little niggle is the reason why we advised caution in our coverage of the 1700X, 1800X, and 1700 heading to sellers like Amazon and Newegg:
Sure, AMD presented a few of its own internal cherry-picked benchmarks, but that tells us very little about the CPUs’ actual performance. We would not deign to recommend (or not recommend) a product we haven’t tested, and we have not yet tested Ryzen.
In other words, AMD is asking you to pay for the promise of performance. Perhaps you’re willing to take the leap of faith based on what we do know about Ryzen, or perhaps you were always going to buy one of these CPUs and are worried that if you don’t preorder, the supply might run dry.
Still, it’s hard not to get swept up in the Ryzen fever. Manufacturers like Asrock, Gigabyte, and MSI; Biostar; and Asus have all revealed new motherboards for Ryzen, and people have practically champed at the bit whenever a little kernel of information has been revealed about the lineup.
hat excitement reached a pitch during the company’s announcement yesterday, where it revealed some benchmarks for the Ryzen CPUs, announced their prices, and offered more information about what AMD has planned for this next generation of products. If Amazon’s best sellers list is anything to go by, that excitement has led to something of a “Shut up and take my money!” moment for AMD. The 1700X, 1800X, and 1700 will debut March 2.
