Everyone’s excited for the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, but there are some awesome deals on AMD’s extant Zen 5 CPUs ready for the taking.
Look, we’re all excited for the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, and there’s really no question that if you’re primarily playing PC games, you’re going to want a CPU with 3D V-Cache. It absolutely is that big of a difference; just look at our Monster Hunter Wildsnumbers from yesterday, where the time-tested Ryzen 7 5800X3D manages the most consistent performance of any processor on the chart.
With that said, if you’re doing other things on your PC, the extra clock rate of a non-X3D processor can be a bigger benefit than 3D V-Cache. There’s also the consideration that those CPUs are expensive for the core count, and don’t really come down in price. The eight-core, 5.4 GHz Ryzen 7 7700X is down to just $269 right now, while the Ryzen 7 7800X3D is still sitting pretty at $479—the same price as the soon-to-release Ryzen 7 9800X3D.