AMD's most powerful gaming CPU is £100 off
The Ryzen 9 7950X3D can do it all, from gaming to content creation.
AMD's Ryzen 9 7950X3D is the most powerful consumer CPU on the market right now, offering top-tier gaming performance and excellent content creation chops thanks to a huge 16-core 32-thread design with 3D V-Cache. Right now, one of best gaming CPUs money can buy is nearly £100 off at Amazon UK right now, dropping from its launch price of £699 to £602 - with a free copy of Starfield Premium Edition to boot.
It's perhaps little surprise when I tell you that the 7950X3D makes for an insane chip for gaming, in no small part down to its 128MB of L3 cache which is massive. In our 7950X3D review, we noted it provided a handy boost compared to the non-X3D variant, the standard 7950X. For instance, in Flight Simulator at 1080p, the 7950X3D provided a result of 86fps, a solid 40 percent faster than the 7950X's result of 61fps.
While it may be a chip primarily designed for gaming, the 7950X3D is also a formidable chip for content creation workloads. Here, its Cinebench multi-core results are fractionally lower than the non-X3D variant, but remain ahead of every other CPU we've ever tested, bar Intel's 13900K - which sucks down significantly more power in our Handbrake encode test, 473W versus 232W.
The 7950X3D runs on AMD's new AM5 platform and is best paired with an X670, B650 or A620 motherboard, though if you're planning a high-end build then opting for X670, with its PCIe 5.0 support, higher allocation of PCIe bandwidth and higher-end VRMs makes a lot of sense. AM5 requires DDR5 RAM; we currently recommend base-spec DDR5-4800 in terms of value or DDR5-6000 to unlock more performance while maintaining good stability.
If it's an especially powerful CPU you're looking for to be the heart of your new build, then look no further than this Amazon deal on the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D.