Get the powerful AMD Ryzen 9 5900X for £260 from Scan Computers right now
It's still a great processor.
We're into that odd stage of time between hardware generations as Ryzen 5000 increasingly becomes older and AMD's newer Ryzen 7000 chips take hold. This means we've seen some incredible discounts on Ryzen 5000 chips in the last few weeks, but this may well be one of the most enticing options we've seen. It's a lesser-spotted discount on one of the more powerful CPUs in the Ryzen 5000 lineup, the Ryzen 5900X - from Scan Computers, it's £260, and includes some free thermal paste.
The 5900X is almost half price compared to its hefty retail price when it launched, and for that, you're getting quite the capable chip. It comes with 12 cores, 24 threads and a boost clock of up to 4.8GHz, making it quite the powerful choice for everything from gaming to intense content creation workloads. As a testament to this, in our review, we noted the 5900X to be one of the top performers in the likes of Far Cry 5, the 5900X took a notable win against Intel's chip of the day, the 10600K, and provided an excellent generation-on-generation boost against the older Ryzen 9 3900XT.
As well as being an excellent performer in a range of games, the 5900X also proved itself to be quite the capable chip for content creation workloads, beating out all of AMD's other Ryzen 5000 series processors, as well as some of Intel's more powerful choice from the time, too. Its HEVC encode rate was tied with the previous gen's 16 core chip, showing the 5900X to be quite an efficient chip, while its Cinebench R20 were also the highest we'd seen for an AMD chip at the time, while it consumed about as much power as the lower-down 5800X, with four fewer cores and threads. That was impressive for the price then, and still rather incredible now.
Going for the 5900X also makes good financial sense from the standpoint of the cost of the other components you'll need for a PC build. Feature-packed AM4 capable motherboards have gotten to some rather great prices these days, while capable DDR4 RAM can be had for peanuts these days. Quick PCIe 4.0 NVMe storage also isn't as expensive as it once was. What's more, with AMD releasing two new AM4 chips in the coming weeks, there's still hope for AM4 yet, making the 5900X an even more enticing purchase. Then of course, with the fact the chip itself has come down to a price as low as this, it makes the prospect of using it as the centrepiece of your build even more appealing.
If it's a powerful all-round AMD CPU you're after for especially reasonable money, this deal on the 5900X is for you.