If you’re trying to buy AMD's new Ryzen 5000 CPUs, good luck. The new processors sold out within minutes on the first day of sales.
We tried to snag one Thursday morning at 6 a.m. PST when sales officially began, but we ran into some challenges. On Newegg, the Ryzen 5900X and 5950X were sold out by 6:01 a.m.
We were able to reach the checkout process on a 5800X and 5600X processor bundled with some RAM. But they were sold out by around 6:04 a.m. and 6:10 a.m., respectively.
The situation was worse on AMD’s official website. The company was selling all four processors, but when we attempted to buy them, AMD’s website repeatedly crashed. We were never able to reach the checkout process. Instead, our browser continually ran into a “503 Service Temporarily Available Error,” a sign that a flood of users had overloaded AMD’s website.
Only by 6:17 a.m. did AMD’s website begin returning to normal. But by then, the Ryzen 5000 products were all listed as out of stock.
This came after AMD had promised to notify buyers when Ryzen 5000 sales were live, if you signed up for an email alert. But we received the email alert at 7:19 a.m., well after the sales began.
Stock was also low or in limbo at other retailers. B&H Photo Video was taking pre-orders for the Ryzen 5000 processors before the 6 a.m. sales began. But now the retailer is simply offering to notify customers when more stock arrives.
Best Buy, on the other hand, originally listed the Ryzen 5000 products as “coming soon,” even after 6 a.m., only to begin sales over an hour later and then quickly sell out. Meanwhile, Amazon has been marking the processors as currently unavailable.
The Ryzen 5000 launch was really no different from Nvidia’s release of its RTX 3000 graphics cards, which have also been incredibly hard to obtain due to high demand. We reached out to AMD on when more stock will be available, and we’ll update the story if we hear back. But Newegg is also indicating it's staggering its stock of Ryzen 5000 chips, so more might become available over the course of the day.
In the meantime, scalpers are already hawking the Ryzen chips on eBay, but at around double the normal pricing.