In an excellent example of “just because you can, doesn’t mean you should,” you can currently buy what looks like an ex-engineering sample of the upcoming Ryzen 5 7600X. Given the better-specced finished chip is set to release in a little over a month’s time for what is likely a much lower price, there’s absolutely no good reason to. But you can.
VideoCardz (opens in new tab) has spotted a few different card samples on Alibaba’s Goofish (opens in new tab) and the latest discovery is this alleged Ryzen 5 7600X sample. The listing even notes the clock speed of this chip being 4.4 GHz, which falls 300 MHz shy of the expected retail clock. Lower performance, and probably a tonne of bugs, are to be expected with this kind of sample device.
The chip could be a cool grab for collectors, or people looking to do very specific overlocking experiments, but other than that it’s hard to find a good use case for something like this. That could be why the seller has put a placeholder price, and requests to be contacted by anyone looking to buy.
While that could be a red flag for some, it’s probably a good move when selling something like this. It’s easy to imagine an unwitting buyer thinking they’re getting the retail version of the chip, as opposed to a weird sample. Although absolutely keep those red flags in view, because this sample is likely being sold illegally, without AMD’s knowledge.
Alongside being a potentially bug-ridden card with a dodgy past, this CPU is basically unusable right now. The motherboards available to support this socket size aren’t actually available yet, although we did get to see them shown off recently (opens in new tab). Even if you managed to get in with one of these early sample releases, you’re still likely going to be waiting until the retail models are available before you have any hardware that will work with it.
What I’m trying to say is there is absolutely no reason to buy this chip. None. Please, let me know if you do and how it all goes.
Still, seeing these kinds of listings on the online marketplace is generally a pretty good sign before a product launches. Hopefully we’ll get a solid look at the pricing (opens in new tab) soon, before the launch of Zen 4 next month.