Pick up AMD's Ryzen 3900X for $420 at Newegg (nice, $80 off)
The Ryzen 5800X has also been discounted, to $390
AMD's high performance Ryzen 9 3900X processor has hit a new low price on Newegg today, where you can pick it up for just $420 - down from a list price of $500.
The $80 reduction is also covered by Newegg's Price Protection, meaning if it goes lower by June 23rd, you'll receive a refund for the difference.
That's a great deal for a 12-core 24-thread processor which absolutely screams in content creation workloads that can take advantage of its high thread count. Ryzen 5000 processors have the 3900X beat in terms of single-core performance, but Ryzen 3000 is still a big step up compared to earlier Ryzen generations in this department - and the equivalent Ryzen 9 processor, the 5900X, is currently retailing for a whopping $673 on Amazon!
With that market reality in mind, the 3900X at $420 offers a ton of value for video makers, programmers, 3D modellers and game streamers. It's also a good performer in games, particularly more modern DX12 and Vulkan releases, as you can read about in Katharine's Ryzen 3900X review from 2019.
Of course, if you care more about performance in applications that use only one or two cores, like older games, then the newer line of Ryzen 5000 CPUs can still make sense.
The best deal we've found on these comes from Antonline's Ebay store, where the Ryzen 7 5800X is going for just $390 - a $60 discount from its normal price.Ryzen 5000 is normally around 15 to 20% faster than Ryzen 3000 processors like the 3900X in terms of single-core performance, and still has enough cores (8) and threads (12) to make it a good choice for content creation.
Which CPU is right for you? Well, I'm personally using the 5800X as I don't tend to do much content creation beyond the odd video transcode, but there are arguments for both of these discounted processors.
You can check out Katharine's Ryzen 5800X review to learn more about that side of the coin, including some game benchmarks against Intel's latest and greatest. One thing to keep in mind is that the 5800X launched at a kind of awkward price which made the 5600X and 5900X more compelling, but we've since seen a shift in prices that's made the 8-core CPU much more in line with its siblings in terms of price versus performance.
No matter which you choose, I'm sure you'll be happy with a new CPU upgrade at a reasonable price - and feel free to let me know in the comments or on Twitter if you have any questions.
With that, thanks for reading the article and we'll see you again shortly.