AMD's best value gaming CPU, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, is down to $329 at Ebay
A great price for a fast processor that works with inexpensive DDR4 RAM and AM4 motherboards.
AMD's Ryzen 7000 processors are brilliant, often beating Intel 12th-gen offerings and drawing close with 13th-gen, while offering support for PCIe 5.0 SSDs, DDR5 RAM and a brand new AM5 socket. For content creation, they're by far the best CPUs AMD has ever produced - but for gaming, there is another option: the Ryzen 7 5800X3D. This CPU remains stunningly fast in some games that can take advantage of its uniquely huge L3 cache, and best of all works with a wide range of inexpensive AM4 motherboards with cheap DDR4 RAM.
Pound for pound, it's by far the best AMD CPU for gaming on the market - and now it's been reduced to just $329 at Antonline via Ebay. That's a healthy $120 reduction from its US MSRP of $449, and a great price overall given the level of gaming performance it provides.
The 5800X3D hasn't yet gotten a review here at RPS, so I hope it isn't too forward of me to link to my review for Digital Foundry. There, I described the 5800X3D as 'a special send-off for the legendary AM4 platform', as befitting its massive gaming performance gains over the 5800X it nominally resembles. For example, in Flight Simulator 2020, we see performance on par with the more expensive (and DDR5-equipped) 12900K, some 33% faster than the standard 5800X. There's a similar gap in Hitman 3, where the 5800X3D is actually three percent faster than the 12900K - super impressive stuff.
Note that in terms of content creation performance, you don't tend to see a benefit from the extra-large L3 cache. Instead, you actually get slightly worse performance than the 5800X, as the chip runs at a lower clock speed to make up for the extra space used for the vertically-stacked cache. That means a vanilla Ryzen 5000 (or Ryzen 7000!) processor remains the superior choice for most all-core workloads like transcoding video, rendering 3D scenes or compiling code.
Anyway, getting the Ryzen 5800X3D for $329 is one heck of a deal, and would form the basis of an excellent value gaming system when paired with a B550 or X570 motherboard, DDR4-3200 to DDR4-3600 RAM and a strong graphics card.
What do you think of this deal? Let me know in the comments below - and don't worry, I'll share any UK deals on the 5800X3D if I find any!