AMD's beastly Ryzen 9 7900X3D gaming CPU drops to all-time low pricing for Black Friday 2023

(Image credit: AMD)

AMD's Ryzen 7000X3D chips remain the best gaming CPUs that your money can buy, and today you can score the Ryzen 9 7900X3D for a wallet-pleasing $433, an all-time low, from Amazon during Black Friday 2023. That's a $166 savings over the recommended pricing for this powerful 12-core 24-thread gaming chip, delivering faster gaming performance than even Intel's flagship $589 Core i9-14900K.

We praised this chip's gaming performance in our Ryzen 9 7900X3D review, but its pricing didn't seem fit for its position relative to AMD's other gaming beasts, the Ryzen 9 7950X3D and Ryzen 7 7800X3D. Naturally, today's discount addresses those issues. And, as you can see in the gaming test results below, the 7900X3D continues to beat even Intel's fastest chips in gaming. It also continues to deliver exceptional performance in other types of CPU benchmarks, like typical productivity tasks.

The 7900X3D leverages AMD's exotic second-gen 3D V-Cache to boost L3 capacity to a whopping 128MB, thus boosting gaming performance to previously unseen heights for a 12-core chip. The Ryzen 9 7900X3D is geared specifically for gamers looking to blast through CPU-limited games, and while there are some tradeoffs in other types of work, it still has 12 cores to help power through heavy productivity workloads.

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Core i9-14900K — (Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

As you can see above, the Ryzen 9 7900X3D is AMD's fastest core-heavy gaming chip, even beating the 16-core Ryzen 9 7950X3D as it lays waste to Intel's latest Core lineup. AMD's eight-core Ryzen 7 7800X3D remains the fastest gaming chip on the market. Still, it doesn't offer nearly the threaded horsepower that the 7900X3D does, which is helpful for heavy multitasking and productivity work, and the differences between the two chips are hard to notice in typical gaming scenarios.

However, if you are focused on productivity work, Intel's Core i7-14700K offers more performance in productivity work, albeit at the loss of performance in gaming.

If gaming is your focus, though, you won't find a better chip than the Ryzen 9 7900X3D at this price point. You will need a Socket AM5 platform to unlock all the gaming goodness, though, but thankfully DDR5 pricing has plummeted, allowing you to cobble together a powerful gaming system that won't break the bank.

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Paul Alcorn is the Managing Editor: News and Emerging Tech for Tom's Hardware US. He also writes news and reviews on CPUs, storage, and enterprise hardware.

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1 Comment Comment from the forums

Avro Arrow

This doesn't surprise me (but it's still too expensive). The R9-7xxxX3D CPUs are some of the most nonsensical CPUs that I have ever seen released for two reasons, the same reasons that I panned these parts when they were released:
Why would a gamer want a dual-CCX CPU? It has been demonstrated over and over that dual-CCX CPUs are inferior for gaming since someone first tried to game with a Threadripper (remember when Threadrippers had a "Gaming Mode" which disabled one CCX?). The Windows scheduler can't handle it properly and it causes gaming performance loss (sometimes severe).
Why would a productivity user want to have 3D V-Cache on one CCX in their CPU? It doesn't help productivity, like, at all and it actually hurts productivity because the 3D V-Cache prevents it from clocking as high as the standard X-variant.The R9-7950X3D sold far better than the R9-7900X3D but that was for the same reason that the RTX 4090 outsold the RTX 4080; the ridiculous "Go Big or Go Home" mentality that some under-evolved apes posing as humans have. To pay more for something that will end up being inferior than less-expensive options is just abject stupidity, nothing more, nothing less.

As I expected, I was right. The R9-7900X3D and R9-7950X3D are both objectively worse than the R9-7900X and R9-7950X, respectively, in productivity performance and they both trail the R7-7800X3D in gaming performance. Hell, the R9-7950X3D leads the R9-7900 (non-X) by no more than 10% in productivity tests that I've looked at and it trails the R9-7950X by a similar amount.

The R9-7900X3D was always the odd man out and it doesn't surprise me at all that they dropped their pants to get rid of it. The price isn't low enough though because it's still more expensive than both the R7-7800X3D and R9-7900X but combines the shortcomings of both CPUs, not their strengths.

I still can't see a situation in which I would be able to recommend that screwed-up Chimera of a CPU for more than $300 because the R7-7800X3D is $360 and the R9-3900X is $390. The dual-CCX design of an R9 will sabotage gaming performance and the X3D sabotages productivity performance. A productivity user would gladly pay an extra $50-$75 for better performance and no gamer wants to pay $433 for what amounts to a six-core X3D gaming CPU when the top-of-the-line eight-core R7-7800X3D is $73 less expensive.

This $433 price tag is still ludicrous and nobody should buy it at that price. This just goes to show how overpriced these things were to begin with. AMD recognised that nobody who was seriously tech-savvy would be willing to buy these CPUs so they pulled an nVidia by making them seem like the sexy "latest and greatest" thing and jacked the price so that the people who bought them would believe that something that expensive must be incredible.

The poor, poor fools.... :(
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