We've known for the past couple of weeks that AMD is working on the Ryzen 5 7600X3D—a 6-core/12-thread processor based on the older "Zen 4" microarchitecture, but featuring 3D V-cache that enables significant gaming performance uplifts. The company finally launched the chip, but here's the bummer—it's only available in the US, and is a MicroCenter exclusive, where's it's going for $299.99. Here's the second bummer—you can't buy the processor on its own, but in a 3-part bundle that includes it, an ASUS TUF Gaming B650-Plus Wi-Fi motherboard, and an unspecified brand of 32 GB (2x 16 GB) DDR5-6000 memory kit. When you add up the prices of the three parts when purchased separately, you arrive at $630, but MicroCenter is selling the bundle for an impressive $450—a $180 discount.

The AMD Ryzen 5 7600X3D comes with a maximum boost frequency of 4.70 GHz, which is a steep 600 MHz fall from that of the regular Ryzen 5 7600X, and 400 MHz less than that of the 65 W Ryzen 5 7600 (non-X). Much like the 7600, the 7600X3D comes with a 65 W TDP. Where it loses on clock speeds, it makes up for with its large cache—1 MB of L2 cache per core, and 96 MB of L3 cache (or 102 MB of L2+L3 "total cache."). The bundle could offer good value for those building PCs from scratch, or coming in from the older Socket AM4 platform. The TUF Gaming B650-Plus Wi-Fi is a fairly feature-packed mid-range ATX motherboard.

Pricing of Intel's upcoming enthusiast-segment desktop processor, the Core i9-14900KS, has been confirmed to be $749, according to a MicroCenter listing. This price is identical to what the company asked for the previous generation i9-13900KS and i9-12900KS. As a Special Edition SKU, the i9-14900KS may not be available in all markets you'd normally find the i9-14900K in, also the chip is expected to have higher cooling- and power requirements. Based on the "Raptor Lake Refresh" silicon, this 8P+16E core processor is expected to come with maximum boost frequencies of 6.20 GHz, and generally better overclocking headroom than the regular i9-14900K. The Core i9-14900KS is expected to go on sale this Thursday, March 14, 2024. Whether it beats the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D at gaming is the $749 question we'll answer soon.

MicroCenter has reduced the price of PowerColor's Fighter Radeon RX 7600 graphics card to $229, representing a nice $40 saving over the original launch price of $269. A digital download version of Bethesda's upcoming epic, Starfield, is also included as a bundled incentive (Standard Edition is worth $69.99) to purchase the budget friendly model that is based on Team Red's Navi 33 XL GPU.

The offer is limited to in-store purchases—it seems that MicroCenter has nullified the option to get the discounted PowerColor Fighter card delivered to your address of choice. Other retailers in North America appear to be selling Radeon RX 7600 cards for around $260. This price bracket is also occupied by Intel's Arc A750 and A770 8 GB models, following consistent price cuts in order to attract cautious buyers to the nascent Alchemist GPU architecture.

The most expensive custom-design NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 will be priced at $1,550, putting it just $50 short of the $1,600 baseline MSRP of the much faster RTX 4090, according to a pricing leak of custom-design cards on popular PC components retailer MicroCenter. The most interesting takeaway from this leak is that there will actually be RTX 4080 cards at the NVIDIA-set baseline MSRP of $1,200. These include the GIGABYTE Eagle, ZOTAC Trinity, ASUS TUF Gaming, and PNY XLR8 Verto. NVIDIA appears to be telling its partners to sell at least one custom-design RTX 4080 SKU at the baseline price.

Most factory-overclocked custom-design RTX 4080 SKUs are within $125 of the $1,200 baseline, with the GIGABYTE Eagle OC priced at $1,240, GIGABYTE Gaming OC at $1,280, MSI Ventus 3X OC at $1,280, and the premium MSI Gaming X Trio at $1,325. The top-tier custom-design cards start here, with the GIGABYTE AORUS Master priced at $1,350, the MSI SUPRIM X (air-cooled) at $1,400, the ZOTAC AMP Extreme AIRO at $1,400, ASUS TUF Gaming OC at $1,500; and the ASUS ROG Strix OC at $1,550, which is just $50 short of the cheapest RTX 4090 (baseline-spec). Will anyone pick the ASUS ROG Strix RTX 4080 O16G over the cheapest RTX 4090 (assuming availability of both)? That's a social experiment to watch out for.

Newegg is not honoring AMD's Xbox Game Pass for PC promotion for some of the very first buyers of AMD Ryzen 3000-series processors. One of these took to Reddit to complain that Newegg started including the Xbox Game Pass with Ryzen 3000-series purchases only after 2:30 PM on the 8th of July (U.S. timezone not mentioned). This contradicts AMD's own terms and conditions for the promotion that define the offer period as beginning on 1st July, 2019, a whole week before Newegg began honoring its bundle. Another buyer reports that MicroCenter began honoring the offer 10 minutes into the July 7 launch. AMD is giving away 3-month Xbox Game Pass subscriptions with purchases of its AMD Ryzen 3000-series processors and Radeon RX 5700-series graphics cards, which gives you access to the Xbox game library, and includes the upcoming "Gear 5" if it releases during your subscription period.

MicroCenter is known for its wacky deals on PC hardware, notably selling processors at below-MSRP rates. In a bid to ensure gamers - and not miners - have access to graphics cards, the retailer is willing to sell you one graphics card at MSRP, provided that the order (cart) includes a processor, a motherboard, a memory kit, and a power-supply (some of the key ingredients of a PC). This offer should help people building gaming PCs from scratch, but not so much people upgrading their graphics cards. It's still way better than how retailers from across the big pond are making sure crypto-mining doesn't irreversibly damage the gaming PC ecosystem. To ensure miners don't swallow up cards at MSRP by bundling them with cheap entry-level hardware, the offer can be redeemed once per delivery address.

Best Buy is another retailer selling graphics cards at prices close to MSRP. Amazon and Newegg are making a killing. This is a particularly terrible time to buy/upgrade your graphics cards, as bulk purchases from crypto-currency miners have caused a triple-digit inflation in prices. If your 2-year old graphics card can't cope with today's AAA games, maybe it's time to buy a console, or play a game IRL (like handball).

Taking a distinct approach towards the whole GPU availability and stock issues that we've been seeing in the past few months - mainly due to the cryptomining craze, partly due to low yields on particular GPUs, MicroCenter has started implementation of hard limits on the amount of graphics cards a single user can purchase. According to the new policy, users can buy up to two graphics cards for the base pricing (varying on model) as-is, but orders including more than two units show each additional graphics card coming in at a staggering $10,000 online. This is true for both NVIDIA and AMD-based graphics cards.

In practice however, things are not as harsh as the pricing here leads one to believe. This is a deterrent to people wanting to purchase more than two GPUs, with a senior level employee needed to be able to add three or more cards for each customers. Once approved, you get to buy the graphics cards at prices that remain between the store and the customer depending on the number of units available and required but the local Microcenter here told TechPowerUp that it is certainly not $10,000/card. Microcenter has made this policy known in person, where most of their sales tend to happen. As such, it is their attempt at limiting access to GPUs for mining conglomerates or particularly affluent individual miners, which would otherwise - as has been the case - buy up the entire inventory. It also marks a particularly strong position from MicroCenter, since usually, for retailers and e-tailers as well as for AMD, a sale is a sale, independent of use or buyer case. The company is likely missing out on some additional orders from miners by going this route, and the fact that they are willing to do so really speaks to how strong their vision is for how the market should be behaving. Likely, it isn't that difficult to circumvent this imposed restriction - but the simple fact that it exists is of note. And while this isn't a new approach (we've seen some retailers do the same around RX Vega 64's launch), this might make it more likely for other retailers to follow suit.

Update: The story initially mentioned that the $10,000 per card from three cards and up was an actual store policy, and it has been updated to reflect its nature as a deterrent instead.