I upgraded my desktop PC about a month ago, and I’m wishing I had waited just a little bit longer. Because while I got a pretty decent Newegg combo on a new round of parts centered on a Ryzen 7 7800X3D, if I was buying right now, I could get an even better deal on the beefier Ryzen 9 7900X3D. The 12-core powerhouse with extra V-cache to boost gaming performance is just $401.05 on Amazon today. That’s one third off its retail price, just a hair’s breadth away from a whopping $200 discount.
The 7900X3D is one of the absolute best CPUs you can stick in a gaming PC right now, just one step down from the Ryzen 9 7950X3D. It’s an AM5-based update to the smash hit Ryzen 7 5800X3D, which wowed both press and gamers alike in 2022 with AMD’s 3D V-cache technology. This extra processor cache is built from the ground up to boost gaming performance, and it certainly does, letting Ryzen chips go toe-to-toe with Intel’s far more expensive high-end desktop Core series.
While the 5800X3D and its stablemates are some late-in-life upgrades for the seemingly immortal AM4 platform, the 7000 series will require both an AM5-compatible motherboard (with its speedier DDR5 RAM) and a separate CPU cooler, since there isn’t one in the box. It’s pretty power-hungry with a TDP of 120 watts, so make sure your power supply is up to the challenge, too. And remember, an AMD-based motherboard is still compatible with both AMD Radeon graphics cards and Nvidia GeForce cards, since both use the same PCIe interface.
