Competition is good, and that is especially the case in the high-stakes flagship desktop CPU segment. Prior to the arrival of Intel's Alder Lake family of processors -- specifically the Core i9-12900K -- AMD's Zen 3-based Ryzen 9 5950X ruled the roost, and steep discounts weren't commonly found. But now that the Core i9-12900K is flexing its performance muscles across a broad spectrum of benchmarks at a lower MSRP, taking a spot on our list of best CPUs for gaming, sales on the Ryzen 9 5950X have become more frequent.
Two weeks ago, the processor fell to an all-time low of just $629 on eBay. Today, the processor dropped even further to just $599.99 over at Newegg. Given that the Ryzen 9 5950X has a list price of $799, this $200 discount is welcome news to those that sit firmly in the AMD camp and want to plug it into one of the best X570 motherboards. Interestingly, the Core i9-12900K features the exact same price as Newegg (after a $13.98 coupon).
If you'd prefer to go the Amazon route, that retailer also has the Ryzen 9 5950X priced at $599, with free one-day delivery for Prime subscribers.
The Ryzen 9 5950X remains one of the best CPUs for gaming, and it's especially adept at productivity tasks due to its solid multi-threaded performance. The processor comes with a base clock of 3.4 GHz and a maximum boost frequency of 4.9 GHz. The Ryzen 9 5950X is built on TSMC's 7nm FinFET process node, pairing 8MB of L2 cache with a capacious 64MB of L3 cache. The processor has a relatively tame TDP of just 105 watts despite its performance credentials.
While the Ryzen 9 5950X currently rules the roost for AMD's consumer desktop platforms, some excitement is brewing for future processor releases. First up will be the Ryzen 9 5800X3D with AMD's 3D V-Cache technology, followed by the next-generation Ryzen 7000 family, powered by 5nm Zen 4 "Raphael" architecture.
