AMD’s Ryzen 7000X3D chips remain the best gaming CPUs that your money can buy, and today you can score the Ryzen 9 7900X3D for a wallet-pleasing $433, an all-time low, from Amazon during Black Friday 2023. That’s a $166 savings over the recommended pricing for this powerful 12-core 24-thread gaming chip, delivering faster gaming performance than even Intel’s flagship $589 Core i9-14900K.
We praised this chip’s gaming performance in our Ryzen 9 7900X3D review, but its pricing didn’t seem fit for its position relative to AMD’s other gaming beasts, the Ryzen 9 7950X3D and Ryzen 7 7800X3D. Naturally, today’s discount addresses those issues. And, as you can see in the gaming test results below, the 7900X3D continues to beat even Intel’s fastest chips in gaming. It also continues to deliver exceptional performance in other types of CPU benchmarks, like typical productivity tasks.
The 7900X3D leverages AMD’s exotic second-gen 3D V-Cache to boost L3 capacity to a whopping 128MB, thus boosting gaming performance to previously unseen heights for a 12-core chip. The Ryzen 9 7900X3D is geared specifically for gamers looking to blast through CPU-limited games, and while there are some tradeoffs in other types of work, it still has 12 cores to help power through heavy productivity workloads.
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As you can see above, the Ryzen 9 7900X3D is AMD’s fastest core-heavy gaming chip, even beating the 16-core Ryzen 9 7950X3D as it lays waste to Intel’s latest Core lineup. AMD’s eight-core Ryzen 7 7800X3D remains the fastest gaming chip on the market. Still, it doesn’t offer nearly the threaded horsepower that the 7900X3D does, which is helpful for heavy multitasking and productivity work, and the differences between the two chips are hard to notice in typical gaming scenarios.
However, if you are focused on productivity work, Intel’s Core i7-14700K offers more performance in productivity work, albeit at the loss of performance in gaming.
If gaming is your focus, though, you won’t find a better chip than the Ryzen 9 7900X3D at this price point. You will need a Socket AM5 platform to unlock all the gaming goodness, though, but thankfully DDR5 pricing has plummeted, allowing you to cobble together a powerful gaming system that won’t break the bank.