The excellent AMD Ryzen 5 5700X is just £161 from Amazon right now
A powerful processor for less.
AMD's processors keep on dropping in price, and therefore keep on becoming even more fantastic value choices at varying price points. The standard 5600 is actually our best budget pick of the best gaming CPUs money can buy, but if it's an octa-core CPU you're after, the 5700X is the chip to go for - especially as it's down to £159 at Amazon UK.
Having an 8C/16T CPU is handy if you're going to be making use of all of them, with more intensive workloads such as both AAA gaming as well as heavy content creation workloads that can involve things such as transcoding and editing video. The 5700X aslo comes with a boost clock of 4.6GHz, making it especially snappy. Taking all this into account, you've got yourself an especially powerful and speedy processor for a great price.
With this in mind, the 5700X offers an insane price to performance ratio for those more intensive workloads. If you want better gaming performance than the 5700X then you'll be left spending £100 or so more on the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, or you could opt for something in the Ryzen 7000 lineup. These chips are coming down in price, but you've then got to deal with building a new system on a new platform. What's more, making the most of it with the latest PCIe 5.0 SSDs and DDR5 RAM is still hideously expensive, even if their respective component prices are still falling.
For most people therefore, the 5700X is still a more than capable processor. I'm in the early stages of planning out a new PC build, and this deal may well be a good platform for anyone in a similar position. Motherboard compatibility is no issue at all, with vast swathes of B550 and X570 options available with a full complement of modern features in terms of ports and connectivity without breaking the bank. Furthermore, it's got to the point where DDR4 RAM is basically peanuts in terms of cost, and PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs are coming down in price too to some insanely cheap levels, even for top models. Going for an AM4 processor to power your PC like this 5700X offers unrivalled value for money without too much of a perfomance penalty compared to the much more expensive hardware afforded by new standards.
£159 for as capable a processor as the Ryzen 5700X really is an excellent deal, and if I had a little bit more time (and money at the moment), I'd be all over this deal for my own new PC build. If you do have that bit more time and money though and you want a CPU that's going to offer a meaningful upgrade for a great price, then you'll want to take a look at this marvellous deal.