Grab the powerful AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D from Currys for a bargain price
A great processor for a lot less.
The powerful AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D is still one of the best gaming CPUs out there, and it's become even more appealing in recent months as its price has fluctuated and dropped down to a level where it makes for quite a steal. At the moment, it's down to a price that beats its Black Friday low from Currys by a reasonable margin - £259, down from its previous list of £349.
With its eight cores and 16 threads, it's an especially potent choice for everything for AAA gaming. A boost clock of 4.5GHz also makes the 5800X3D one of the speedier processors out there in AMD's AM4 lineup, and helps it along to some solid results in our testing. In our review, we noted the 5800X3D provided a major speed boost in titles such as Flight Simulator, where at 1080p, we recorded a benchmark result of 59.53fps. For reference, the non -3D variant of the same processor recorded a result of 44.45fps - it's on this front where it's easy to see where the 96MB L3 cache really comes into its own.
It's really on the front of gaming where the 5800X3D comes into its own with that much larger cache, given its content creation benchmarks aren't as much of an upgrade on other 5000-series chips as you may well expect. With that in mind though, it's still an excellent choice for intense content creation workloads that can involve especially fiddly tasks such as transcoding video and rendering high-res files.
The added bonus of going for the 5800X3D at this point is that it's gotten to the point where feature-packed AM4 capable motherboards are getting to some reasonable prices, and other components such as RAM and storage are getting cheaper. For reference, if you want to grab a 32GB kit of DDR4-3200 RAM, which is the price-to-performance sweet spot, this Crucial Pro kit is just £63 from Amazon. As for storage, we may be seeing prices rise a little due to NAND flash price rises, but you can still get capacious SSDs with blazing fast speeds for good money - just take a look at an article I wrote on the Lexar NM790 4TB for £230 from Scan Computers, and you'll see what I mean. You can have the bare bones of a killer PC build for especially reasonable money with this in mind. If you've already got a capable build though, and you want to add in one of the most potent chips in its price range, this deal on the 5800X3D is also well worth a look, as well as those building a new PC on the AM4 platform.
£259 for a chip as powerful as AMD's Ryzen 7 5800X3D is an especially tempting deal, and if you're someone who wants one of the best gaming CPUs without having to splash out on all the AM5 extras, this is a fantastic choice.