Get a good CPU + motherboard combo for less than £180 with these deals
Intel Core i3 12100F or AMD Ryzen 5 3600, you choose!
AMD's Ryzen 3600 is one of the best value gaming CPUs, and now it's available for just £170 with a Gigabyte B450M motherboard from AWD-IT. That's a £50 reduction from its normal price, and some £22 cheaper than the CPU and cooler on Amazon. This would make an excellent start to a new system, with the 3600's six cores and twelve threads pairing well with a modern RTX 20-series or Radeon RX 5000-series or later graphics card.
While this combination is a strong one, it's not the only viable option available at the moment. In researching this piece, I also spotted that Amazon are doing a similar bundle for a Ryzen 5 3600 and an Asus Prime B450M-K motherboard with an AMD Wraith CPU cooler for £195 - so this might be a good shout if you want a decent included cooler and prefer Asus motherboards to Gigabyte's offerings.
Similarly, the cheap and performant Intel Core i3 12100 can be purchased with an H610 motherboard for a similar price. For example, you could go for an MSI Pro H610M-B DDR4 motherboard and the Core i3 12100F for £82 + £95 = £177. This should get you better gaming performance, thanks to faster cores, but worse content creation performance (eg transcoding video) as you have only four cores with the Intel CPU.
Anyway, some interesting options there. Thanks for joining me for this deal and we'll catch you again next time!