The Ryzen 9 5900X 12-core CPU has dropped to £449 - that's £60 below RRP
An incredible turnaround for a flagship processor previously nigh-impossible to find at RRP
AMD's Ryzen 9 5900X processor is the best high-end CPU on the market, trouncing Intel's flagship Core i9 10900K and 11900K parts in most games while drawing less power and offering significantly better content creation performance thanks to its 12-core 24-thread Zen 3 design. That's perhaps why this CPU has been almost impossible to find for a reasonable price for months following its release.
Today though, Overclockers in the UK has dropped the price of the CPU to just £449, a solid £60 below its RRP (!!) and considerably cheaper than you'll find it at other retailers like Scan (£489), Amazon (£508) or Ebuyer (£529).
We covered most of this the last time the Ryzen 9 5900X was discounted - back when a price of £500 was noteworthy! - but it's worth running through the basics here, especially if you didn't catch Katharine's review late last year.
To wit, the 5900X is an extremely powerful CPU that slots into a surprisingly affordable AMD ecosystem, where an inexpensive air cooler, B450 motherboard and 3200MHz RAM is sufficient to extract excellent performance. Of course, you can pair the 5900X with faster RAM, a bigger cooler and a fancier motherboard to wring even better results out of it, but it's nice that this is optional rather than required as we often see with Intel CPUs.
The 12-core, 24-thread design means that you get incredible performance in multi-threaded applications like 3D rendering, video transcoding and code compilation. It also means great performance in games built on modern graphics APIs, like DirectX 12 and Vulkan, especially those that know how to utilise the high core count. Right now six to eight cores is where most games start to suffer from diminishing returns, but with both next-gen consoles sporting eight-core designs you'll be well placed to take advantage of new games that do better at splitting their processing across arbitrarily high numbers of threads. Put simply, this CPU should stay competitive for longer than its four-core or six-core predecessors!
However, the biggest change from previous AMD Ryzen processors are the Zen 3 cores inside. By moving more cores into a single core complex with shared cache, AMD have been able to provide a nearly 20% performance bump in single-threaded applications. That means even in older games that do most of their processing on a single thread - like Far Cry 5, for instance - you get sizeable gen-on-gen gains compared to a Ryzen 3900X processor, and even more from older Ryzen CPUs.
So, to sum up: extremely fast Ryzen 9 5900X CPU. Lowest price we've ever seen. Wide compatibility with affordable components. Competitive even with Intel's latest, which costs more. Highly recommend picking up the 5900X at this price!