Nab the excellent AMD Ryzen 7 7700X from Amazon for under £300
An insane price for an insane processor.
Now this really is an excellent deal. AMD’s Ryzen 7 7700X is quite the potent processor, and you can currently grab it for Amazon for under £300, marking out a great platform for a new system to be built on.
The 7700X may well be the upper mid-range choice in AMD’s new Ryzen 7000 lineup, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a powerful choice. In our review, we noted the performance of the 7700X actually rivalled that of the more expensive and more powerful 7950X and 7900X, especially in CPU-intensive titles such as Flight Simulator 2020. There also proved to be a notable improvement in performance across the board with faster 6000MT/s DDR5 RAM, although the 7700X in most instances posted results that were a couple of frames higher than the 7950X and 7900X, while coming in at a much more reasonable cost.
For content creation too, the 7700X, with its eight cores, 16 threads, and a boost clock of 5.4GHz, should also make for an especially potent choice. Here, our testing revealed it to offer performance that was just shy of 30 percent better than the last eight core/16 thread processor AMD released, last generation’s 5800X. While the 7900X and 7950X are better bets here, the fact remains that the 7700X makes for a better proposition for value for money, as well as for the sake of efficiency, with a much lower TDP.
Just a small caveat though - if you do want to grab the 7700X, you will need to pick up a corresponding AM5-capable motherboard. This is because Ryzen 7000 processors are built on a new socket platform, unlike with the previous generations of AMD chips. While this means you may well be starting from scratch, the fact is that opting for AM5 can afford you some pretty handy benefits for the future, chief amongst these being the inclusion of PCIe 5.0 and DDR5. At the moment though, the vast majority of people will only be able to take advantage of one of these - DDR5 RAM is coming down in price, as is noted by this deal I spotted earlier on some Corsair Vengeance 32GB DDR5-6000 RAM for £128 from Amazon.
Getting the 7700X for under £300 from Amazon really is a tasty proposition, and if you’re someone in the market for building a new PC like I am, then you may well want to take a closer look at this.