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The 42nd Golden Joystick Awards will be streamed live next month, and it's set to be hosted by voice actor Ben Starr.

Starr, known for voicing Final Fantasy 16 protagonist Clive Rosfield and Prometheus in Hades 2, is set to be joined by a host of guest presenters. These include Neil Newbon (Astarion in Baldur's Gate 3), Patricia Summersett (Princess Zelda in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom), Alex McKenna (Sadie Adler in Red Dead Redemption 2), and Abubakar Salim (Bayek in Assassin's Creed Origins and director of Tales of Kenzera: Zau).

On the upcoming awards ceremony, taking place on November 21, Starr had this to say: "I’m thrilled to announce that I’ll be your guide to this year’s Golden Joystick Awards. We’ll be celebrating the greatest games of the past 12 months - but more importantly, the talented teams of people who made them possible. 

"Tune in for an evening of fashionable festivities, where you can expect special guests, showmanship, and plenty of silly jokes. See you soon, and if you haven’t already, get your votes in now!"

This year's Golden Joystick Awards will feature 19 separate categories including Best Storytelling, Best Indie Game, Best Soundtrack, Best Lead Performer, and Best Gaming Hardware. Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth and Astro Bot are leading the charge with five nominations apiece, whereas Helldivers 2 and Balatro put on a strong showing with four and three nominations respectively.

You'll be able to watch the 42nd Golden Joystick Awards live on November 21 via YouTube, Twitch, Facebook, X / Twitter, and Steam. TechRadar Gaming as well as GamesRadar and PC Gamer will also be livestreaming the event.

Be sure to get your own votes in over at GamesRadar's dedicated Golden Joystick Awards page, too! You can vote right now and voting closes on Friday, November 1 at 4pm PDT / 7pm EDT / 11pm GMT.

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AMD’s Ryzen 7 9800X3D has some impressive potential to be fine-tuned for eye-opening performance levels, or that’s the latest rumor (among many) around the soon-to-be-unleashed Zen 5 processor.

Wccftech spotted that on the Anandtech forums, Igor Kavinski leaked some benchmark scores for the Ryzen 9800X3D. These come complete with CPU-Z details of clock speeds, and notes on the processor configuration used to achieve the eye-opening boost clock shown – namely just over 5.6GHz across all eight cores.

The Ryzen 9800X3D (likely a prerelease engineering sample chip) was turbocharged to those levels by using Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO) and Curve Optimizer (CO) plus a raft of other manual fine-tuning of the CPU by Kavinski. We can guess the cooler used was a high-end effort, too, which all goes to explain hitting 5.6GHz, which is quite remarkable across all the processor’s cores.

To put it in perspective, the rumored all-core boost of the 9800X3D is 5.2GHz out of the box (with no tuning), although that’s still a good deal faster than the 7800X3D (at 4.8GHz).

Turning to the benchmarks shown, one is from Cinebench R23 and the Ryzen 9800X3D comes out well here too, with a score of 2,261 in single-core and 25,258 in multi-core. As Wccftech points out, for the latter, the Ryzen 7800X3D typically falls between 18,000 to 19,000, so this appears to indicate that this (heavily amped up) 9800X3D could be a good 30% faster when it comes to non-gaming performance.

As for gaming, a Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail benchmark is aired here, showing a score of 62,360 (but the GPU that the 9800X3D was paired with isn’t shared). We don’t have comparisons for the 7800X3D there, but the general reaction to the result is that it’s again impressive – as you’d expect from the juicing up that’s gone on here.

(Image credit: Future) Analysis: Trying to guess the real generational uplift

Clearly, we need to bear firmly in mind that not every Ryzen 9800X3D buyer will go to lengths that Kavinski has done here – many won’t – and there are unknowns like the cooling setup and how fancy it was. So, the benchmark leaks need to be interpreted with a healthy dose of skepticism, but just seeing that all-core boost pushed this high is promising.

Looking at the gains here, we can anticipate (read: guess) that out of the box – with standard cooling and no CPU tuning – we could see the 9800X3D be about 10%, or possibly up to 15%, faster than the 7800X3D for gaming. And a good deal more than that for everyday use away from PC games – as this is not the only leak which has suggested that the all-round performance of X3D has been seriously pepped up with Zen 5. Mainly because AMD seems to have solved the problem of the clock speeds being held back by that 3D V-Cache with the 9800X3D (and by extension the other X3D chips for Zen 5 when they arrive later on).

We can certainly be broadly optimistic about a decent performance uplift, in both gaming and overall terms, given that we are (supposedly) getting quite a boost for clock speeds, plus the generational gains for Zen 5 X3D on top. (Despite some other leaks having outlined a bleaker situation – spillage you need to take with a heap of salt in our opinion).

Whatever the ultimate generational performance increase ends up being, the other vital part of the equation will be pricing – will the 9800X3D retail at $449 (in the US, and proportionate to that elsewhere) as its predecessor did? Or will AMD charge a bit less than this? The latter is probably tilting too far with the optimism, but the point remains that whatever performance boost we get with the 9800X3D will need to be viewed through the lens of the MSRP, naturally.

AMD has confirmed that Ryzen 9000X3D will arrive on November 7, 2024 – all rumors point to this just being the Ryzen 9800X3D CPU, with a possible reveal in just a couple of days. The 9800X3D is, of course, very much anticipated as the successor to the rightly popular 7800X3D (which has now all but vanished from the shelves), with the hope that it’ll wash away some of the bad taste that the Ryzen 9000 launch has left (in the mouths of PC gamers, anyway).

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As a CTO, it’s my job to make sure tech is an integral part of our company’s success. This can come down to the tools we use and the products we build. But while there’s a lot of talk about the ability of tech to save time or cancel out inefficiencies, what about its ability to drive diversity?

In recent years, diversity has been the subject of budget cuts, slipping down the priority list of leaders. After all, what’s in it for them? Aside from a more fair, diverse and creative workplace that thrives off self-esteem, empowerment and innovation, that is.

Well, if that wasn’t enough, the new dawn of ESG reporting will mean that companies will finally be held accountable for their diversity targets. Plus in tech we need to recognize that we are designing products and services for an increasingly diverse consumer base. What will drive this point home even more is the EU Accessibility Act which will aim to make everyday products accessible for people with disabilities.

Consumers are no longer homogenous; they are brilliantly diverse and different. So how come we can’t say the same for the teams building the products and services for them?

The scale of the challenge

The most rewarding part of my job is harnessing the brilliance of a bunch of engineers and making it translate into something for the business. To do this, I don’t prescribe what an engineer should look like. Speaking for myself, I’m non-binary, neurodiverse and disabled, looking far different from what people stereotypically imagine a technical leader looks like.

Too often, employees, especially leadership, are expected to adhere to a cookie cutter definition of an infallible superhuman. But there’s nothing wrong with being human. Whether you have an exciting perspective from a different culture, a fluctuating gender identity, get sick like the rest of us or exist on the spectrum. You are human and should be celebrated for being such.

But most European businesses are still struggling to build diverse workplaces. According to a DEI Index compiled by EY, the average score for European companies is just 5.69 out of 10. With only Swiss companies achieving an average score of 6.0. While only 34% of managers surveyed belong to underrepresented groups, with trans representation in the tech sector only 0.17% – down on the national sector average of 0.5%.

This is not a numbers game though. Research shows that diversity – whether neurodiversity, gender diversity, ethnocultural diversity or otherwise – is one of the most important drivers of innovation, performance and employee engagement. And high engagement drives high performance. McKinsey estimates that hiring ethnocultural minority employees (EMEs) could contribute an additional €120 billion to EU-27 GDP a year. Similarly, neurodiverse teams are 30% more productive than others, while those organizations that respect pronoun use are seeing greater levels of validation, while avoiding psychological distress, depression, low self-esteem and even suicidal ideation.

Businesses are well and truly out of arguments for failing when it comes to diversity. So how can they begin to make progress? And should technology play a central role?

Can tech really improve diversity?

Using technology to help improve DE&I might not be the leap we think it is. In the same way we use work management tools or GenAI, technology can act as a sparring partner and help compensate for our own DE&I knowledge gaps.

For instance, when it comes to hiring, there are good gender decoders that can remove the gender bias from job ads that we might not even be aware was there to begin with. This can help address the difference in gender response to job applications and level the playing field for applicants.

Similarly, we’re also starting to see AI sifting CVs. However, we must be cautious around how much responsibility we are giving to AI. It is traditionally trained on what “success” looks like, and there’s a risk that AI can reinforce human biases. For instance, there have been examples of AI approval systems refusing loans for marginalized communities.

It is important to remember that while technology can bring advantages to improving diversity, it is not about to replace humans. For example, it should not be determining who we hire off the back of an info dump from CVs. Plus anyone reviewing a CV still needs to understand that by default they are biased and that they need to fight against this through unconscious bias training and active resistance.

There is a trend right now to dive headfirst into implementing time-saving technologies. But we should start small. Instead of using technology to write policies or manage affinity groups, we should use it to empower our teams to respect pronouns or access resources to improve their understanding. As much as 55% of people are worried about saying the wrong thing when it comes to workplace diversity, so let’s use technology to help them ask questions and empower curiosity.

This approach meets a critical prerequisite for diversity: it removes barriers, fear and judgement, and normalizes something normal.

The human role remains

It’s exciting to think about the role technology can play in driving diversity. But we can’t neglect the continued need for a human in the loop.

Businesses keen to improve the diversity of their teams should use technology to assist them, not take shortcuts. And this is true of commitment too. Because even with the most powerful AI in the world, without leadership buy-in and an active determination to not just hire, but maintain a diverse workplace, we’ll fall short.

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The procurement function hasn’t traditionally been seen as leading the way in technological advancement. Most often it is sales and marketing that experiments and adopts emerging tech such as Generative AI. Many even expected Gen AI to pass the department by without much impact.

But, as Gen AI continues to influence business performance in all industries, procurement has taken notice and teams are embracing its adoption. Research found that almost a quarter (24%) of UK businesses have deployed Gen AI in procurement and supplier management in the last 12 months, with 55% planning on implementing Gen AI.

So what’s different this time? Gen AI is providing enormous efficiency gains. Organizations that have adopted Gen AI tools have seen a 44% reduction in manual processes across the procurement and supply chain function.

As early adopters reap its benefits, organizations that can’t implement Gen AI and use it effectively risk being at a competitive disadvantage.

But organizations can’t run before they can walk. Instead, they need to ensure they have the right foundations in place by digitizing their procurement processes.

The road to gen AI is paved with poor digitization

When it comes to Gen AI use, a clear innovation gap is appearing – and digital laggards have a long way to go to close the gap. Digital transformation has stalled in the last five years: UK organizations now say they have digitized just 48% of their procurement processes in the past year on average, compared to 45% in 2019.

Procurement and supply chain functions with poor digitization are still subjecting employees to onerous manual tasks, stunting efficiency and limiting the organization's ability to make quick, informed decisions regarding their suppliers and spend.

Crucially, the lack of digitized processes in the procurement function leads to subpar data quality, limiting the accuracy and consistency of the data, and muddying the waters of clear decision-making in supplier risk or performance management, for instance. This is critical for firms looking to adopt Gen AI – as a lack of quality data can be a limiting factor that can substantially impact the effectiveness of Gen AI insights in procurement and supplier management.

The smart use of data

Organizations looking to capitalize on the productivity gains Gen AI offers must put in the hard yards. This means taking a smarter approach to procurement, digitizing their processes from source to pay. This includes building a solid foundation of data from the unification of multiple systems across an enterprise.

Data is the lifeblood of AI, and without quality data, organizations won’t see valuable outputs from Gen AI. Using a single source-to-pay platform that unifies and cleanses your data and combines it with information generated from various sources will be critical for the success of businesses. Organizations that can ensure data is accessible, high quality, and accurate are spending less time on tactical issues (e.g., building reports, syncing data, etc) and more time on building intelligent processes. Access is critical as if data is dispersed, systems will struggle to access it and match relevant information, which can exacerbate data accuracy problems.

With more accurate information at its disposal, Gen AI can allow procurement leaders to bridge the technological and data gaps that they previously risked succumbing to.

The AI end-game in procurement

With digitization across the source-to-pay process, organizations have the foundations in place to establish a single source of truth for supplier and spend data. This allows Gen AI to have an immediate impact on organizations' efficiency and their decision making capabilities.

As organizations fully digitize their processes, Gen AI can produce instant contract analysis and summarization in multiple languages, supplier and category research assistance, and supplier performance SWOT, RFX generation and more. With Gen AI built on fully digitized processes, organizations can also speed up risk assessments and mitigation plans and allow employees to effectively “chat with your data”, allowing users to instantly find information about suppliers, spending, contracts and transactions.

Think of Gen AI as having numerous assistants in various parts of the source-to-pay process. Traditionally, a member of the procurement team would have to take time to summarize a contract, research a category, write a report, draft an improvement plan and create a questionnaire on a new regulation. All of these manual steps can be removed with Gen AI, ultimately giving teams back time to focus on high value, strategic activities.

In fact, of the 44% of organizations that have adopted Gen AI tools, 69% of efficiency savings have been seen in task automation, 67% in internet research, 59% in document analysis and 48% in content creation. When processes are digitized and Gen AI has good quality data to pull from, procurement teams can create first drafts of RFPs quicker, or collate more comprehensive and accurate market intelligence reports.

The path to procurement transformation

Slow digitization poses an existential roadblock to businesses seeking to leverage Gen AI for productivity gains and resource unlock. Organizations must have the right data foundation in place and the buy-in of user trust to ensure Gen AI solutions are embedded seamlessly within existing procurement technologies.

Gen AI is already proving to be a catalyst for procurement transformation, but a technological and data gap needs to be bridged before organizations can make full use of Gen AI.

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Researchers from Cybernews have reported finding a huge database containing sensitive customer information from the Mexican healthcare sector left unprotected online

The team discovered a misconfigured Kibana instance with a “tremendous volume” of information, later attributed to eCaresoft, a software company behind two cloud-based Hospital Information Systems - Cirrus and Anytime. These platforms are used by more than 65 hospitals, 110 outpatient care centers, and more than 30,000 doctors, to help manage different aspects of work, such as inventory management, medicine management, appointment booking, and more.

According to Cybernews, the database contained sensitive information on more than five million people, leaking things like names, ethnicity, nationality, religion, blood type, birth dates, gender, phone number, email address, CURP (Mexican personal identification number), expenses, hospitals visited, and payment request descriptions.

Shift in tactics

Kibana is an open source data visualization and exploration tool. It is used for analyzing and visualizing log data stored in Elasticsearch, a distributed, open-source search and analytics engine, commonly used for indexing and querying large volumes of data in real time.

Unprotected and poorly managed databases remain one of the key causes of data leaks, and this instance contained more than enough information to help threat actors mount identity theft, phishing, and possibly even wire fraud.

Luckily, health records or payment data were not exposed, however Cybernews stressed the CURP numbers are “a particular cause of concern”, since they are the Mexican counterpart to the US Social Security Number.

The database has subsequently been locked down, but it's not known for how long it remained open, or if someone found it before the researchers. We also don’t know if the victims have already been notified about the breach or not.

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Some LinkedIn users have reported losing hundreds or even thousands of followers, likely due to a bug which has since been fixed, but the glitch has already fuelled widespread concern about the Microsoft-owned job site’s integrity.

Given the ongoing battle regarding bots and other illegitimate accounts on social media, many have wondered whether the change was a deliberate clean-up effort by LinkedIn to eliminate such accounts.

Other users expressed concerns they may have unknowingly violated policies leading to the loss in their follower count, but this now looks not to have been the case.

LinkedIn users are losing followers

Following the circulation of rumors around the internet and hours of radio silence, LinkedIn finally confirmed that it had identified a problem and resolved it, failing to add any further details about what caused the drop in follower counts.

The platform confirmed on its LinkedIn Help X account: “We heard some members may have seen a change in their connection and follower count. Our team quickly looked into this. We're happy to report this has now been resolved.”

LinkedIn’s status page reported it became aware of the issue and started investigating at 03:00 PDT on October 22. Four hours later, it was still investigating the issue. At 10:00, seven hours after the first post, the platform confirmed, “issues with [user] follower and connection count on LinkedIn” had been resolved.

Although account functionality remained unaffected, the sudden loss of followers on a professional networking platform such as LinkedIn could have serious implications for users who rely on their profiles for business development and personal branding.

Moreover, the company has been criticized for failing to notify users of the issue on its own LinkedIn page, adding to the dissatisfaction with the service.

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Prime Video has already seen huge success with their adaptation of Fallout, and now a TV adaptation of God of War is coming to the streaming service. It seems the beloved video game series is in good hands too, with Ronald D. Moore attached as showrunner.

You might know Moore from his work on For All Mankind, which is considered to be one of the best Apple TV shows. He's no stranger to the sci-fi genre, having worked on Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and Battlestar Galactica, so it will be interesting to see how he approaches God of War.

What do we know about Prime Video's God of War TV show?

So far, we don't have much to go off when it comes to the planned God of War TV series. It's been in the works for a while, though, with Prime Video first announcing it back in December 2022. During that time, we were teased what the plot might entail.

The streaming service reported that the show would follow Kratos' "dangerous journey with his estranged son" to fulfil his wife's final wish to "spread [her] ashes from the highest peak". "Kratos soon realises the journey is an epic quest in disguise" and one which "will test the bonds between father and son, and force Kratos to battle new gods and monsters for the fate of the world".

However, there have been some changes to the team and it is unknown if the plot will change now that Moore is on board as showrunner. He takes over from predecessor Rafe Judkins, so there could well be some changes heading our way.

Now that the show is back on track, it'll be interesting to see if it joins our best Prime Video shows line-up, which is already packed with some great entries. In a world where videogame adaptations are, thankfully, getting better, I do have high hopes for this one.

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The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the government agency that regulates civil aviation in the United States, has published its final regulations that will facilitate the certification of ‘powered lift’ aircraft.

In a press release sent out by the FAA, it claims that the powered lift category is “the first completely new category of civil aircraft since helicopters were introduced in the 1940s”, paving the way for air taxis and futuristic cargo delivery solutions.

The final rule, which was issued earlier this week, forms a framework for the qualifications and training that instructors and pilots must have to fly this new-fangled type of aircraft, but it will also help speed up the certification of new models.

In essence, the powered lift category describes the numerous electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) craft that have been hogging the news agenda over recent years, with the likes of Hyundai-owned Supernal and Joby Aviation all seemingly ready to unleash the air taxi of the future.

(Image credit: Toyota/Joby Aviation)

The concept craft, which are often powered by battery packs and electric motors, feature tilting rotors that allow it to take-off and land on a vertical plane, then titling to allow forward or backward propulsion.

Many of those burgeoning start-ups dabbling in eVTOL concepts have been frustrated at the FAA’s proposal to create an all-new category of aircraft, claiming that it would slow down progress. But the FAA has continued to claim it wanted to “to prioritize the safety of our system”, rather than rush into things.

This new certification, which combines existing regulations and updates others, effectively allows air taxis to be used commercially. The FAA has even gone so far as to produce a blueprint for how Urban Air Mobility vehicles will operate in the near future. It is heavy-going, but fascinating nonetheless.

Analysis: the future of air travel is here

(Image credit: Hyundai/Supernal)

Some industry analysts are predicting that the air taxi market is predicted to grow to $80.3bn from the $4.9bn that it was worth last year, while research suggests that there are currently 1,044 vertiports (sites where air taxis will operate from) planned for development between now and 2028.

Even notorious stickler-for-the-rules, the UK, has planning permission for its first vertiport in Bicester, Oxfordshire, while Dubai has apparently gone all in on the technology, claiming it will have an air taxi in operation by the end of next year.

Those in the Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) game say that the eVTOL craft has the ability to reduce congestion and allow those in a rush to speed across cities in comfort. Hyundai’s Supernal SA-2 electric aircraft, for example, will cruise at speeds of up to 120mph at an altitude of around 1,500ft, much lower than commercial helicopters and aircraft.

During conversations with Supernal’s CEO and ex-NASA man Jaiwon Shin, it has been suggested that its offering could operate like a ride-hailing business, effectively taking some of Uber’s most premium offerings to the skies.

More recently, Joby Aviation received a further $500 million cash injection from Toyota in a bid to speed up the certification process and nail down a method of mass producing these large aircraft.

By announcing its final regulations in the US, the FAA has not only made it easier for companies to achieve the certification required to put eVTOL craft into service, but it will also drastically speed up the training of pilots.

The FAA has adapted the rules so it can apply helicopter operating requirements to some phases of flight, effectively negating the need for further training, as well as allowing pilots to train in powered-lift with a single set of flight controls – legacy rules require two flight controls – one for the student and one for the instructor.

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You might think that declining subscriber satisfaction with the best streaming services was a given in the face of rising subscription prices, the introduction of more ads and increasing account restrictions, but new research suggests it's more to do with customers being less satisfied with what's available to stream.

A recent TiVo survey of close to 5,000 people in the US and Canada shows that subscribers are increasingly fed up with the quality of content available, reports Ars Technica. This trend has only become more pronounced over the past three years, with survey respondents' abilities to find 'moderate to good' stuff to watch falling from 78.6% in 2022 to 74.5% in 2024.

What's most interesting is which services subscribers are most unhappy with. A CableTV.com study from the start of the year that surveyed a similar group of participants revealed that Disney Plus, Hulu, Max, Netflix and Paramount Plus have all seen satisfaction rates fall this year – and that's no surprise with each platform raising subscription prices in 2024.

The outliers of this trend? Apple TV Plus, Peacock and Prime Video have all improved since 2023, with Apple TV Plus and Peacock in particular seeing consistent gains since the same surveys were conducted in 2022 and 2021. That confirms a trend that a Whip Media survey from 2023 first revealed, showing that smaller sized platforms are winning subscribers over more than their incumbent rivals.

Is the Peak TV era over?

FX networks' boss John Landgraf has been predicting the end of the peak TV era since 2022. He's been speculating that streaming services would have to start reigning in spending before the writers' strikes completely scuppered production in 2023 and signs of that increasing decline in originals being made have only grown.

We've since seen more cut-throat decisions from all the major streamers, in particular Netflix, which has ramped up its cancellations in 2024 – that doesn't mean you should completely disregard these though, here are seven cancelled Netflix shows still worth watching.

But arguably the biggest confirmation we've had that streaming services are no longer investing as much as in original movies and shows is that the number of new scripted series being released has dropped for the first time in 10 years, according to FX Research.

My biggest takeaway from this temperature check of the streaming space is that the behemoths need to switch up their strategies. Raising prices, ads and bundling isn't going to win over subscribers – even if we are seen as not complaining enough – content is.

This is where the likes of Netflix could really take a page out of its smaller rival's playbook. Its strategy of quantity over quality seems to have run its course with industry insiders telling Bloomberg that "most people in the film business don’t think Netflix makes good movies" and looking at some of its recent movies I'm not entirely shocked. It's high time we got Stranger Things and Black Mirror back.

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Fire TV and Google TV aren't the only smart TV platforms with fancy AI-generated wallpapers; Samsung is now offering them too. The feature, which Samsung calls Generative Wallpaper, is coming this month to 2024 models in North America, Europe and South Korea before rolling out worldwide next year.

It's unclear whether the new feature will require you to install a software update or if it'll just pop up when you access your TV's Ambient Mode, but according to Samsung it's going to be really easy to use: go to Ambient Mode, select the Generative Wallpaper button and then choose a theme.

The examples Samsung's using are "off to nature", "seize your day", "happy holidays", "party mood", "inspire me", "deco" and "unspeakably traumatizing eldritch horrors". Okay, we made that last one up.

Why Generative Wallpaper may look familiar

We've seen Generative Wallpaper before: it's on many Samsung phones under the Creative section of the Change Wallpapers page. Here's our guide to using it on the Samsung Galaxy S24.

If the TV version works like the phone one, you'll select a broad theme first and then personalize it with your own keywords to generate a visual that's uniquely yours and that you can save for future viewing.

The TV version is coming to both the Neo QLED and QLED ranges, both of which run Samsung's Tizen OS. However, there are no indications of whether the feature will also be rolled out to older Tizen TVs.

Generative wallpaper in its various flavors is the latest attempt by manufacturers to make their TVs more interesting when they're not showing movies or TV shows; Samsung's The Frame (and similar models such as TCL's NXTFRAME) take things further still by showing human-made artworks.

It'll be interesting to see if AI wallpaper catches on, or if it's going to be the 'Live, Laugh, Love' posters of 2025.

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AMD continues to support its AM4 motherboards well into its AM5 socket with some of the best processors on the market, and a new leak seems to prove that, as it reveals several upcoming AMD Ryzen processors that are compatible with the older gen boards.

New leaks, the first coming from reliable X (formerly Twitter) leaker @momomo_us and the second from an investigation by Wccftech, tell us that three upcoming processors will work with the AM4 motherboard. The former leaker posted the three chips — the AMD Ryzen 5 5600XT, Ryzen 5 5600, and Ryzen 3 5300G — as well as specs for the 5600.

The latter confirmed that Asus and MSI updated their motherboard compatibility lists to include these chips, though other manufacturers like ASRock and Gigabyte haven’t done the same yet.

What makes this even more interesting is that other AM4 processors like the Ryzen 7 5800X3D are starting to fade out of the supply chain. If this leak turns out to be true, then AMD will be replacing it with three new chips that can support this motherboard.

The Ryzen 5 5600XT is expected to feature six cores (12 threads) with a base clock of 3.8GHz, the Ryzen 5 5600T with six cores but a base clock of 3.5GHz, and the Ryzen 3 5300G is expected to have a quad-core chip with Radeon Vega graphics.

AMD’s support of AM4 continues

Fingers crossed that these leaks are accurate as that would be excellent news for budget-minded gamers. Though giving credit to these reports is a previous announcement from AMD during Computex 2024 in which the Ryzen 9 5900XT and the Ryzen 7 5800XT were revealed to be compatible with AM4.

The pricing for those two chips is pretty solid as well, with the former at $359 (about £280 / AU536) and the latter will sell for $249 (around £195 / AU$373). It seems that while AMD is still giving us high-end chips meant to compete with the likes of Nvidia, it’s also dedicated to putting out more affordable ones for those who don’t have the funds to buy a whole new processor as well as a motherboard.

AMD continuing to throw support behind AM4 motherboards is more than commendable and should honestly be more of an industry standard, especially when the component in question is still used by a significant install base. Once AM5 becomes the new dominant tech in the future, I hope that the tech giant treats it with the same level of dedication.

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