If you’ve been waiting to upgrade your desktop, today’s the day to go big. Amazon is selling AMD’s monstrous Ryzen 9 3900X for $420. That’s $50 off Amazon’s most recent price, the all-time low, and an all around solid price for this processor. It debuted at $500, but topped $740 on the street during its launch window last July.
That’s because this processor is a beast. The Ryzen 9 3900X packs a ridiculous 12 cores and 24 threads, running at a 3.8Ghz base clock and capable of boosting up to 4.6GHz. It also supports the cutting-edge PCIe 4.0 interface for blisteringly fast storage.
We were amazed at the 3900X when we reviewed it last July. In fact, we said that most people should consider this processor rather than Intel’s Core i9-9900K. The cost to performance ratio is just that good. Intel still has a slight edge over AMD in gaming, but it’s not the gaping chasm it once was, and the Ryzen 9 3900X packs four more cores and eight more threads than Intel’s flagship, giving it a massive leg-up in many productivity tasks.
AMD drives home its value advantage by throwing a Wraith Prism LED cooler in the box, unlike the 9900K. Remember, however, that Ryzen’s CPUs don’t come with integrated graphics. You’ll need to have a graphics card at the ready to use with this CPU. Our guide to the best graphics cards for PC gaming can help if you’re on the hunt for one of those, too.