Now this is a bargain and a half, and you don’t want to miss it if you’re thinking of buying yourself a shiny new gaming CPU. This Amazon CPU deal enables you to buy an AMD Ryzen 9 7900X3D for just £329 right now, saving you a huge $120 on the usual AMD MSRP.
This 12-core AMD CPU is kitted out with 3D V-cache, a huge 64MB stack of it in fact, which provides a substantial boost to gaming frame rates in our own tests. At its current price, this 12-core CPU is also even cheaper than the eight-core Ryzen 7 7800X3D, which is our guide’s current overall best gaming CPU.
The 7900X3D not only has four more cores than this chip, but also a much higher boost clock of up to 5.6GHz, compared with just 5GHz on the 7800X3D. The super-low price of just $329 represents a huge saving on this 12-core gaming CPU, which originally launched at an MSRP of $599, and is currently available for $449 direct from AMD. We’ve seen it drop to $390 before, but $329 is an incredible price for this high-end chip.
There is a catch here, though, which is that the 7900X3D’s big stack of 3D V-cache is only found on one of the chiplets under this CPU’s big metal heatspreader. That’s not a problem on the cheaper 7800X3D, as it only has one core chiplet die containing all eight cores, meaning all eight of those cores can access the extra cache.
However, the 7900X3D has two core chiplet dies, each with six cores, and only one of them has the 3D V-cache. As a result, in some cases, the 7800X3D can be quicker than the 7900X3D in games, as more of its cores can access all that extra cache.
Even so, the Ryzen 9 7900X3D’s 12 cores and higher clock speeds make it a better all-rounder than the 7800X3D, and six of its cores still have access to that huge block of extra cache to accelerate gaming performance. If you want a CPU that does it all for the cheapest price possible, this is the processor to buy right now.
In order to run the Ryzen 9 7900X3D, you’ll need a Socket AM5 motherboard, and you may also need to flash the BIOS in order for it to recognize this CPU. You’ll also need some DDR5 RAM, as AMD’s Socket AM5 platform doesn’t support DDR4. If you’ve never installed a CPU before, check out our full guide on how to build a gaming PC, where we run you through the process.