AMD's flagship Ryzen 9 7950X3D CPU drops to £529.99 for Amazon's Prime Big Deal Days (normally £600+)
The best price we've seen on AMD's fastest consumer CPU.
AMD's Ryzen 9 7950X3D was dubbed the fastest gaming processor when it was released earlier this year, a fearsome accolade for a CPU that also features incredible content creation performance thanks to a 16-core, 32-thread design.
AMD's flagship Zen 4 part normally costs around £600 after initially debuting at £700, but today you can pick it up for £529.99 with Amazon's Prime Big Deal Days.
The 7950X3D remains AMD's foremost processor to this day, and is a great all-rounder for folks that want one PC to do it all. So why is it so fast?
Well, the excellent single-core speeds of AMD's Zen 4 design are augmented by faster DDR5 RAM and the more powerful voltage delivery of the AM5 socket, and reach their zenith with the top-binned 7950X3D which is able to hit higher frequencies than its Ryzen 7000 brothers. This speed advantage benefits basically every task you can run on a computer, including games, and provides the perfect basis for dominating performance.
The 7950X3D expands upon this with a 16-core, 32-thread design that is basically the most you can get in a consumer CPU - for anything bigger, you're starting to look at server-grade Threadripper parts which cost significantly more and need their own special professional-grade motherboards. With this many cores and threads, you can blitz through anything task that can be made to run in parallel, like video transcoding, video rendering, 3D rendering, code compilation and so on. Of course, this also helps multi-tasking, as you can split even multiple intensive tasks across the 32 threads at your disposal.
Finally, we have the 3D V-Cache, indicated by the X3D part of the name. This 128MB of L3 cache speeds up almost every game out there, as the CPU can hold onto more data at once and doesn't have to wait for data to be fetched from slower system memory (RAM) as often. This has a small positive effect in some games, but an absolutely massive one in others like Flight Simulator 2020 (40 percent faster!), Cyberpunk 2077 (13 percent faster), Factorio and Cities Skylines. Generally, the more stuff is being simulated in the game, the more the extra L3 cache helps, but you tend to see at least a five percent frame-rate advantage in any game.
Altogether, this makes the 7950X3D an incredible CPU for a high-end rig and well worth considering at this reduced price point. Be sure to check out our best gaming CPUs round-up for more info if you need it!
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