As AMD Announces New X3D Chips, Ryzen 9000 Received Helpful Price Cuts

We had two interesting news from AMD recently. Firstly, the official recognition of its new -X3D chips, although nothing beyond the November 7, 2024 announcement date. More fully, there have been some useful price cuts on the standard Ryzen 9000 lineup.

Allow me to explain further. On all Ryzen 9000 chips, we see ‘special holiday pricing’, which started on October 20th, although we have no idea how long these deals will last. The flagship Ryzen 9 9950X has received $50 off, while the rest of the lineup is $30 off in the US. However, in the UK, both the 9950X and 9900X have seen price cuts of £50, while the 9700X and 9600X have dropped by £30 and £40 respectively. If you’re interested, here are the new prices and links to where we find the CPUs at these reduced rates – the only one that’s hard to find at the time of writing is the 9950X in the US, as it’s still showing up for $ 599 at many retailers.

The reason for these price cuts? To take it to Intel with its new Core Ultra 5 245K and Core Ultra 9 285K. With these reductions, this means that AMD outperforms Intel at the low end of the market while being about $10 more expensive at the high end. It remains to be seen how Intel’s chips work, but it could make a big difference to the overall judgment.

Does this make these chips worth buying? Well, that definitely makes them a more sensible purchase than their launch price, especially in the case of the 9700X and 9600X, which are genuine improvements on their predecessors in gaming workloads. We noticed a 10 to 17 percent increase depending on the game in our tests. For the 9950X and 9900X, our review noted that they deliver better content creation results where you’re likely to use all cores at any given time, though not so much in the gaming sense where performance is virtually identical. Either way, the Ryzen 7 7800X3D remains gaming supreme, though perhaps only for a few more weeks.

However, these chips make a little more sense with their reduced prices, if you want. The 9700X and 9600X make the most sense in my head, but if you want a 9950X or 9900X, we have links for those too.