The best gaming processor money can buy is down to £331 from Laptops Direct right now
A lot of processor for the price.
It's hard to believe that I've never actually fully covered a deal on what is, pound for pound, the best gaming CPU money can buy today. AMD's excellent Ryzen 7 7800X3D has reached a bargain price at Laptops Direct today, following a couple of days where the chip has tumbled down in price at various retailers. Right now, it's currently £331, down from its previous price of £405.
As the successor to AMD's highly-rated 5800X3D, it's fair to say we had high hopes for AMD's Ryzen 7000 equivalent. However, the 7800X3D surpassed those expectations, given its sheer performance. The eight cores and 16 threads on offer at first don't seem like they'd make the 7800X3D the ultimate gaming chip, but it's because of its single chiplet design that allows it to run faster in games than the higher-end dual-chiplet 7900X3D and 7950X3D. In our review, we noted the 7800X3D to offer some rather stellar performance, with some fantastic benchmark results in the likes of Flight Simulator 2020, where AMD's chip posted a result of 96.7fps at 1080p and in Metro Exodus EE where the 7800X3D pulled ahead of AMD's own 7950X3D and Intel's 13900K with a result of 299.28fps at 1080p.
A TDP of 120W means it's also quite an efficient chip given the performance on offer, too, and it isn't too difficult to cool. I'm currently running one in a new PC build, and the Noctua DH-15 I'm using is almost overkill for it. The only chink in the 7800X3D's armour is its suitability for content creation workloads. While its results in synthetic benchmarks still ahead of Ryzen 5000 chips, they actually fall behind even AMD's own 7600X, the base model chip in the Ryzen 7000 lineup. It's still perfectly capable of running content creation workloads, although not as efficiently as AMD's non-X3D chips of a similar stature.
You're certainly fetting a lot of CPU for the outlay here, and if it's the quickest gaming CPU money can buy you're after, this Laptops Direct deal on the 7800X3D is not to be missed.