Back to more sensible levels.

AMD's Ryzen 7 7800X3D still remains a top dog in 2026 if you're after a beefy gaming CPU for your PC. The newer 9800X3D is slightly faster, although it's pushing £400 in the UK at the time of writing, making it a fair bit more expensive. By contrast, the 7800X3D is some £70-odd cheaper with a deal I've found, while not compromising much on general performance against its newer brother. It's currently down to £336 from Amazon, which is one of its better prices in recent weeks. For one of the best best gaming CPUs we've tested, it's worth a look.

When the 7800X3D first launched, we had high expectations for the AM5-based counterpart to the immense 5800X3D. It's fair to say though that we found the chip to surpass its expectations with sheer power. The eight cores and 16 threads on offer at first don't seem like they'd make the 7800X3D the ultimate gaming chip, but it's because of its single chiplet design that allows it to run faster in games than the higher-end dual-chiplet 7900X3D and 7950X3D. In our review, we noted the 7800X3D to offer some rather stellar performance, with some fantastic benchmark results in the likes of Flight Simulator 2020, where AMD's chip posted a result of 96.7fps at 1080p and in Metro Exodus EE where the 7800X3D pulled ahead of AMD's own 7950X3D and Intel's 13900K with a result of 299.28fps at 1080p.

A TDP of 120W means it's also quite an efficient chip given the performance on offer, too, and it isn't too difficult to cool. I've been running one in my own gaming PC for the last two years, give or take, and the Noctua NH-D15 I'm using is almost overkill for it. You could easily get away with a less beefy tower cooler, or use an AIO if you wanted to.

The only chink in the 7800X3D's armour is its suitability for content creation workloads. While its results in synthetic benchmarks still ahead of Ryzen 5000 chips, they actually fall behind even AMD's own 7600X, the base model chip in the Ryzen 7000 lineup. It's still perfectly capable of running content creation workloads - I've used mine to reencode a lot of recent Blu-Ray backups in Handbrake and it's been generally up to the task - although not as efficiently as AMD's non-X3D chips of a similar stature from Ryzen 7000, 9000, or even Intel's Core Ultra Series 2 rival, the Core Ultra 7 265K.

You're certainly getting a lot of CPU for the outlay here, and if it's one of the quickest gaming CPUs money can buy you're after, this Amazon UK deal on the 7800X3D is not to be missed.