AMD Ryzen 9 9950X & Intel Core Ultra 7 265K Deals Hit Record Low For Prime Day
Even Amazon is not waiting around for its own Prime Day sales event to dish up tantalizing deals. The event starts tomorrow, July 8, and runs through July 11 for 96 hours of discounts. However, some chunky discounts are appearing early, including a couple of notable deals on fast processors from AMD and Intel, one of which comes with a gaming bonus.
Starting with AMD, you can score the company's Ryzen 9 9950X for just $434 at Amazon (33% off) right now. It's never been listed for less as an item that is sold and shipped by Amazon, with the previous low (not including marketplace sellers) being $517, which was the price at the end of May of this year. So even going by street pricing, this is a heck of a discount.
The Ryzen 9 9950X is based on AMD's latest-generation Zen 5 architecture, and if you're building from the ground up, you'll need both a socket AM5 motherboard and DDR5 memory.
AMD's top non-3D V-Cache chip for consumers sports 16 cores and 32 threads. It also features a 4.3GHz base clock, up to a 5.7GHz boost clock, 16MB of L2 cache, 64MB of L3 cache (80MB total cache), integrated Radeon graphics clocked at up to 2.2GHz, and a 170W TDP.
Given that this is a high-end chip, we recommend pairing it with an X870 or X870-E motherboard. There are lots of options out there, such as Gigabyte's X870 Aorus Elite WiFi7 (on sale for $259.99 versus $319.99) and MSI's MAG X870 Tomahawk WiFi (on sale for $229.99 versus $359.99), to give just a couple of examples.
If you're looking to build a more affordable gaming PC, we've seen reports saying AMD's Ryzen 5 9600X was on sale for $165 at Amazon over the weekend. It's showing as out of stock as of this writing, but it'd be worth refreshing every once in a while to see if that changes.
If you prefer to go with Intel, you can score the Core Ultra 7 265K for $259 at Amazon (36% off). Based on Arrow Lake, Intel's newest architecture got off to a bit of a rocky start but has been greatly improved with a handful of fixes since launch.
The 265K is a mid-range chip with 20 cores and 20 threads (Intel ditched Hyper Threading with its Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake chips). It consists of 8 performance cores clocked at 3.9GHz to 5.5GHz, and 12 efficient cores running at 3.3GHz to 4.6GHz.
Other features include 36MB of L2 cache, 30MB of L3 cache (66MB total cache), onboard graphics clocked at 300MHz to 2GHz, and a dedicated NPU serving up 13 TOPS of AI muscle. Base power is set at 125W, while maximum turbo power is 250W.
It's a good bang-for-buck option and to make it even better, Intel's Spring Gaming Bundle, which includes free keys for Sid Meier's Civilization VII and Dying Light: The Beast.
