One of the best gaming CPUs you can buy now comes with a free 1TB SSD to help fill out your build. Right now, Newegg is selling the Ryzen 7 5700X3D for $208 and including a 1TB TeamGroup MP33 SSD in the order. That price is the same as you'll find on Amazon and elsewhere, but the SSD, which is worth $53, is good enough to be the boot drive in a budget PC build or a second drive in a more expensive computer.
The 5700X3D is the best value in gaming CPUs right now. Yes, it uses AMD's older-gen AM4 platform, but its huge 96MB of L3 cache allows it to boost performance in games that are CPU limited, particularly those running at 1080p resolution.
On our 1080p gaming test suite, the 5700X3D we reviewed was comfortably ahead of current-gen Intel and AMD chips with less cache such as the Core i5-14600K or Ryzen 7 7700X. The 5800X3D is a bit faster as are newer-gen chips like the Ryzen 7 7800X3D, but those are much more expensive and don't come with extras.
What about the SSD it comes with? The TeamGroup MP33, which we reviewed, is an older, low-end SSD that uses a PCIe 3.0 interface and is rated for just 1,800 MBps and 1,500 MBps sequential reads and writes. It has no DRAM cache either. But if you're trying to save money and build a PC that costs less than $600, this is a great way to avoid having to plunk down $50 to $80 on a 1TB drive. And you could get by with those speeds and not notice a huge difference in key experiences such as game loading.
However, if you're more into productivity than gaming, the Ryzen 7 5800X is a better choice, because it's a bit cheaper but has the same boost clock and core count. For $189, you can get the 8-core CPU with 32GB (2 x 16GB) of Corsair DDR4-3200 RAM. That's high-quality RAM that usually sells for $57.
You can find the Ryzen 7 5800X selling for a bit less if you buy it from Amazon where it's only $171. But then you're giving up the RAM. That's really good RAM and, for most people, 32GB is more than enough.
