AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D Is Amazon's Top-Selling CPU And It's Just $359 On Sale
Did you receive an Amazon gift card for Christmas? If so, and if you're looking to upgrade or build a new gaming PC, AMD's Ryzen 7 7800X3D should be on your short list of options. Yes, it's a previous generation part at this point, but it's available at a great price and, just as importantly, it's actually in stock. The same can't be said for AMD's newer Ryzen 7 9800X3D.
As much as we like the newer chip—check out our Ryzen 7 9800X3D review for benchmarks and analysis—finding it in stock is proving to be a tough task. It's a hot commodity in the PC gaming space, and aside from lucking timing with short-lived restocks, the only way to get one is to pay an inflated price by a marketplace seller. No thanks.
Meanwhile, the Ryzen 7 7800X3D is still an excellent gaming CPU, and it's readily available for $359 at Amazon (20% off MSRP). That's not the lowest price it has ever been, but it's not far off either.
Based on AMD's Zen 4 architecture, the Ryzen 7 7800X3D is an 8-core/16-thread chip with a 4.2GHz base clock, up to a 5GHz boost clock, 8MB of L2 cache, and 96MB of L3 cache. In comparison, the Ryzen 7 9800X3D (based on Zen 5) is also an 8-core/16-thread chip, with a 4.7GHz base clock, up to a 5.2GHz boost clock, and the same amount of L2 and L3 cache.
AMD re-engineered its 2nd generation 3D V-cache design for Zen 5 to allow for direct cooler access to the processor cores, which in turns enabled AMD to make the chip fully overclockable. So if that matters to you, it could be worth waiting until stock inevitably becomes more plentiful.
Otherwise, the 7800X3D is still a great option. It's also the best-selling CPU on Amazon, for whatever that's worth. It's a list that's dominated by Ryzen (the top 11 spots all belong to AMD at the moment), which is a testament to AMD's Zen architectures.
One final note—both the Ryzen 7 7800X3D and Ryzen 7 9800X3D use AMD's socket AM5 platform. As fortuitous timing would have it, we just recently posted an AMD X870E motherboard mash-up, with in-depth analysis of three solid optiosn from ASUS, ASRock, and MSI.
