Three months after the announcement of the OEM-only Ryzen 9 5900, it appears that the chips are indeed hitting the market. This is because we looked at various PC builders and found none offering the 12-core, 24-thread Zen 3 processor.

The only Ryzen 5000 CPUs currently available are the Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 X-series, with the Ryzen 9 5900X only available for pre-order and no word on when it will ship.

Perhaps that's why the lower-clock, lower-TDP non-X versions have yet to actually be released, despite having a nominal release date of January 12 of this year; AMD's Ryzen processors have been a thorn in our gamer's side, though not as much as the Radeon GPUs. [4.7 GHz peak clock, while the 5900X is 4.8 GHz, so it can't keep up with the pace of the X-series Zen 3 silicon, but we don't believe there is a host of 7nm chips that could be mounted on the 5900's straight CPU.

Still, regular tweaker TUM_APISAK dug up the Userbenchmark list of OEM-only chips, suggesting that an actual processor does exist. The performance listed by the notorious Userbenchmark (an unreliable site that unfairly favors Intel CPUs) is not important, the fact that it is there is.

If Ryzen 9 5900s begin to be regularly supplied to retailers and system builders are able to ship more 12-core AMD gaming PCs, that is objectively a good thing; Zen 3 processors are excellent and realistically the best gaming PCs are currently pre-built machines.

This is the way of AMD's previous generation chips, and indeed, the latest APUs as well, and the Ryzen 9 3900, the previous generation equivalent of this latest OEM-only part, is being used in laptops.

However, it sucks for the DIY market that AMD is only putting these 65W parts in the hands of OEMs. OEMs are only good these days. Where once building a gaming PC was fun, it is now a painful, frustrating, unnecessarily expensive, and often painful ordeal.