AMD's flagship Ryzen 9 7950X3D has dropped below £450 with a code from AWD-IT
Nice.
As much as AMD's Ryzen 9 7950X3D is the brand's flagship chip and one of the best gaming CPUs money can buy, it rarely comes on discount. However, today I've spotted an incredible discount from AWD-IT which has brought the chip down to within only £100 or so of the much revered 7800X3D - it's down to £450, but with code NICE, you can also get an extra 69 pence off at checkout. It's not so much that discount which is worth talking about, but the main price cut from £655.
I should say before going any further that this is an OEM chip, as opposed to being a full retail version. In essence, this means it comes without a retail box, or a cooler. However, the 7950X3D doesn't come with a cooler in its retail packaging anyways, so it's just the box you're missing out on here in terms of cosmetics, while saving £30 or so compared to the next best price for a retail chip. The big kicker, in theory at least, is the difference in warranty - usually these OEM chips don't come with as much as the retail chips. Having spoken to an AWD-IT representative though, for them at least, the OEM chip's warranty is the same as that of the retail one - 1 year through the retailer, and the remainder with AMD directly.
The 7950X3D is a 16 core/32 thread processor which throws down incredible performance in virtually any case, whether it's gaming or content creation workloads, and in a large part offers immense gaming performance because of its massive 128MB of L3 cache. In our 7950X3D review, we noted it provided a handy boost compared to the non-X3D variant, the standard 7950X. For instance, in Flight Simulator at 1080p, the 7950X3D provided a result of 86fps, a solid 40 percent faster than the 7950X's result of 61fps, while in Cyberpunk 2077, its 104fps result is excellent, too. There are also further gains to be had with DDR5-6000 RAM, which provides a noteworthy uptick in performance in some games to make the most of your new chip.
While it may be a chip primarily designed for gaming, the 7950X3D is also a formidable chip for content creation workloads. Here, its Cinebench multi-core results are fractionally lower than the non-X3D variant, but remain ahead of every other CPU we've ever tested, bar Intel's 13900K - which sucks down significantly more power in our Handbrake encode test, 473W versus 232W.
The 7950X3D runs on AMD's new AM5 platform and is best paired with an X670, B650 or A620 motherboard, though if you're planning a high-end build then opting for X670, with its PCIe 5.0 support, higher allocation of PCIe bandwidth and higher-end VRMs makes a lot of sense - to this end, AWD-IT also has a solid deal going on this MSI X670E Gaming Plus Wifi mobo with sleek looks, plenty of ports for expansion and a great deal of I/O for £230. AM5 also requires DDR5 RAM; we currently recommend base-spec DDR5-4800 in terms of value or DDR5-6000 to unlock more performance while maintaining good stability.
If you want to grab the zippiest CPU money can buy today with a hefty discount, look no further than this stonker om AMD's Ryzen 9 7950X3D from AWD-IT.