As AMD announces new X3D chips, Ryzen 9000 has received handy price cuts
It makes a bit more sense now.
We've had two interesting pieces of news from AMD recently. Firstly, the official acknowledgment of their new -X3D chips, although nothing beyond the November 7th 2024 announcement date. More integrally, there have been some useful price cuts on the standard Ryzen 9000 lineup.
Allow me to explain further. On all of the Ryzen 9000 chips, we're seeing 'special holiday pricing', which started from October 20th, although with no idea how long these deals will last. The flagship Ryzen 9 9950X has received $50 off, while the rest of the range has $30 off in the USA. In the UK however, both the 9950X and 9900X have had £50 price cuts, while the 9700X and 9600X are down by £30 and £40 respectively. If you're interested, here are the new prices, and links to where we've found the CPUs at those reduced rates - the only one that's difficult to find at the time of writing is the 9950X in the USA as it is still showing at $599 at a lot of retailers.
- AMD Ryzen 9 9950X - £559.99/$549 (was £609.99/$599)
- AMD Ryzen 9 9900X - £399.99/$469 (was £459.99/$499)
- AMD Ryzen 7 9700X - £309.99/$329 (was £339.99/$359)
- AMD Ryzen 5 9600X - £229.99/$249 (was £269.99/$279)
The reason for these price cuts? To take it to Intel with their upcoming new Core Ultra 5 245K and Core Ultra 9 285K. With these reductions, it means AMD undercuts Intel at the lower end of the market, while being around $10 more expensive at the higher end. It remains to be seen how Intel's chips perform, but this could make a fair bit of difference to the overall judgement.
Does it make these chips worth buying? Well, it definitely makes them a more sensible purchase than their launch pricing, especially in the case of the 9700X and 9600X, which are genuine improvements on their predecessors in gaming workloads. We noted anything from 10 to 17 percent uplift, depending on the game in our testing. For the 9950X and 9900X, our review noted that they offer better content creation results where you're likely to be using all the cores at any given time, although not so much in the sense of gaming where performance is virtually identical. In any case, the Ryzen 7 7800X3D remains supreme for gaming, although maybe only for another couple of weeks.
Nonetheless, these chips make a bit more sense with their reduced prices if you want one. The 9700X and 9600X make more sense overall in my head, but if you'd like a 9950X or 9900X, we've got links to those as well.