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Grab AMD's fastest mainstream gaming CPU for a record-low $399.99 right now
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Put simply, AMD dominates the gaming CPU world right now. While the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D isn't the most powerful, it's still the best option for gamers, offering a good performance-to-power ratio. It's simply a powerhouse, and right now, it's down to a new record low price of $399.99 at multiple retailers. Considering the performance you can get with a 9800X3D, you'll want to grab it if you've got an AM5 build.
Both Newegg and Amazon have it at this record price, but you'll need to apply some coupons to get the price. At Newegg, that means using the coupon code BFF36 at checkout to knock $70 off its current list price, while at Amazon, you'll need to click or tap to apply the $49.01 coupon, shown below the price.
There aren't many options for gaming that beat the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D. It's a powerhouse that was, until recently, the best CPU for gaming in the world, beating every other chip due to its boosted L3 cache capacity. You're getting an eight-core, 16-thread processor, made using AMD's current-gen Zen 5 architecture, with a boost clock speed of 5.2 GHz, and a 120W TDP.
The 9800X3D is fully unlocked, so it's possible to overclock it, which was a limitation in older 3D V-cache chips from AMD. It's that extra L3 cache that makes this such a special chip, too, stacked beneath the CPU cores closer to the heat spreader on a reconfigured die.
This 8-core X3D beast of a processor is on sale at its lowest ever price. While the Ryzen 7 9850X3D is faster by around 3%, the benchmarks prove how close of a run it is, with this CPU requiring 30% more power for almost the same performance.
Grab it from Newegg instead for $399.99 using the coupon code BFF36.
Faster chips do technically exist, like the AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D, which our CPU benchmark data shows is 3% faster at 1080p than the 9800X3D, although with much higher power demands. The 9800X3D offers the best performance per watt of any other gaming CPU, so you can really maximise performance without a huge increase in electrical power. You can see, too, from the Bench charts below that the 9800X3D sits very close to the top as far as CPU performance goes.
Put simply, if you pair this processor with a recent GPU, you won't see many bottlenecks. Pair it with a top-class option like the RTX 5080 or RTX 5090, and you'll be hitting high frame rates in any game you can throw at it. CPU-intensive games like Cyberpunk 2077 won't be let down by that 96MB of L3 cache included in this X3D chip.
Given how good a processor this is, and how little Intel has been able to rival it, we can't see it falling out of date for a long while yet. It's sitting at the top of the food chain and will continue to dominate games for years into the future. AMD's AM5 platform, meanwhile, remains in use, and AMD has promised to support it for at least one more generation.