Radeon RX 5700 XT 50th Anniversary addition
AMD wasn’t quite done yet, at the very end of the presentation AMD revealed two more surprise announcements. There will be a Radeon RX 5700 XT 50th Anniversary Edition video card in honor of AMD’s 50th Anniversary. This will be exclusively available on AMD.com for $499.
This has all the same specifications as the AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT with 40 Compute Units and 8GB of GDDR6. The only difference seems to be that it is clocked higher at 1680MHz Base Clock, 1830MHz Game Clock and 1980MHz Boost Clock. The Radeon RX 5700 XT has a Game Clock of 1755MHz. Therefore, this has a 75MHz faster Game Clock. That’s a 4% clock speed increase. The maximum Boost is at 1980MHz versus 1905MHz on the RX 5700 XT.
We don’t know if the memory clock speeds and bandwidth are the same, but our best guess is that they are. That means the 50th Anniversary Edition is just a slightly higher clocked video card from AMD exclusively. If this reminds you of NVIDIA’s Founders Edition, you wouldn’t be crazy to think along those lines.
At $499 it is a whole $50 more expensive than the regular RX 5700 XT, for just a slight 4% clock speed boost. The price premium versus the actual clock speed improvement seems to be a bit imbalanced. At $499 it’s going to compete with factory overclocked RTX 2070’s.
AMD Ryzen 9 3950X CPU
The next announcement was also a surprise, AMD is moving gaming beyond even 12-cores this generation. This is huge news to be honest, this is the kind of announcement that pushes technology forward in a big way.
The AMD Ryzen 9 3950X CPU is a 16-Core, 32-Thread gaming CPU. It runs at the highest boost frequency yet from AMD this generation, 4.7GHz with a TDP of 105W. It has an MSRP of $749 and will be available this September.
For desktop gamers or high-end desktop creators, this is the most affordable 16-core/32-thread CPU available to date. This CPU has huge potential also outside of gamers. For workstation or business users this allows an incredible amount of performance in a low TDP at a low dollar point. The entry into a very fast and capable CPU for multi-threading workloads has been moved down, and now many more people can access this level of performance for individual, self-businesses or large businesses.