AMD Launches ‘Combat Crate’ Bundle, Includes Radeon RX 580, Ryzen CPU & MSI Motherboard

Many who are trucking along with an aging rig have found themselves stuck between a rock and a hard place this past year. GPUs have often proven scarce, likely by Folding and Seti@home enthusiasts (right?). When there has been good availability, it’s been grossly overpriced. Graphics cards that should cost $500 have been regularly priced at $1,000 for many months, though people who keep on top of things can sometimes get lucky and not feel too violated after clicking the Buy button.

To help give people an easier way to procure some important new hardware, AMD has teamed up with MSI to bundle a motherboard and GPU along with either a Ryzen 7 1700, or Ryzen 5 1600 processor. The ‘Combat Crate’ goods can be seen in the teaser shot below:

MSI’s Radeon RX 580 ARMOR makes an appearance here, and it supports the full 8GB framebuffer we’d expect to see. Alongside that is MSI’s B350 Tomahawk, an ATX offering that’s well-suited to handle the duties either of the Ryzen chips will ultimately demand (the same goes for the GPU).

As of the time of writing, the Combat Crate can be found at Amazon for $549.00, which saves you close to $40 if you purchase as a bundle rather than individual parts ($176.37 processor; $84.99 motherboard; $326.89 graphics card). The Ryzen 7 1700 version of the crate is “coming soon”.

It says right on the front of the Combat Create box that it has “All You Need To Game”, but really, you’ll probably also need some memory, storage, a chassis, additional cooling (CPU includes a cooler in the box), and unless the EFI is your game of choice, you’ll also need an operating system.

To be fair to AMD, it does say that the Combat Crate is for those looking to upgrade, although if you are upgrading from a rig that’s a few years old, you may need to make an additional purchase to upgrade from DDR3 to DDR4. If not, you’ll still need to make sure that your sticks will perfectly complement the motherboard, since some sticks are fussier than others. Unfortunately, it seems the official support site isn’t spitting out a list (as of the time of writing), so hopefully it returns soon.