AMD's Ryzen 7000X3D chips remain the best gaming CPUs that money can buy, and today the Ryzen 9 7950X3D is only $569, a savings of 20%, at Amazon during Black Friday 2023. That's a $130 savings over the recommended pricing for this powerful 16-core 32-thread gaming chip, which delivers faster gaming performance than even Intel's flagship $589 Core i9-14900K.
We noted in our Ryzen 9 7950X3D review that for the highest-end gaming systems, no other chip can match the 7950X3D’s sheer gaming and productivity performance horsepower. As you can see in the gaming test results below, the 7950X3D is only beaten by its other X3D siblings — Intel's CPUs can't keep pace. Despite its blistering speed in gaming, the 7950X3D also continues to deliver strong performance in other types of CPU benchmarks, like heavy productivity tasks.
The 7950X3D 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 16-core chip. The Ryzen 9 7950X3D 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 16 cores to help power through heavy productivity workloads.
As you can see above, the Ryzen 9 7950X3D is the fastest core-heavy gaming chip in AMD's arsenal, though the plucky eight-core $359 Ryzen 7 7800X3D still reigns as the fastest overall gaming chip on the planet. However, it doesn't offer the threaded horsepower that the 7950X3D does, so it isn't remotely as fast in heavy multitasking and productivity work. Additionally, the differences between the two chips are hard to notice in typical gaming scenarios.
You will need a Socket AM5 platform to unlock all of the 7950X3D's gaming goodness, though. Thankfully, DDR5 pricing has plummeted, allowing you to cobble together a powerful gaming system that won't break the bank. You'll also need a strong cooler for the chip, but it does sip power compared to Intel's Raptor Lake Refresh processors, all the while delivering more gaming performance with no fuss.
For more savings, check out our up-to-the-minute Black Friday tech deals live blog. There you'll find the latest deal news and buying advice from our editors all day and night.
For even more savings, see our lists of the best Black Friday SSD deals, Black Friday GPU deals, Black Friday CPU deals, Black Friday gaming laptop deals, Black Friday monitor deals, Black Friday 3D printer deals and Black Friday PC hardware deals overall.
