AMD's Ryzen 7 9700X is currently $70 off at Amazon USA
A decent price on a capable chip.
It's fair to say that AMD's latest run of CPUs, the Ryzen 9000 series arrived with a lot of fanfare but not too much in terms of an overall performance against their predecessors. With this in mind, they are still generally better chips. We've also seen them drop in price since release, making for a much more compelling option if you want to change over to AM5 from an older system, or want to upgrade your existng rig - for instance, this Amazon reduction takes 19 percent off the Ryzen 7 9700X's $359 list price, giving it to you for $289.
In our review, we noted the eight-core/16 thread 9700X to provide a decent uptick in performance overall from its predecessor, the 7700X. It's a potent chip for content creation workloads, with faster Zen 5 cores contributing to both an 18 percent increase in the single-core score of Cinebench 2024. In the Handbrake encode test though, performance is around level with its predecessor.
As for gaming performance, the 9700X's 65.78fps at 1080p in the notoriously CPU-intensive Flight Simulator 2020 is a good start, with an 11 percent lead over the 7700X. It's a similar story in Hitman 3, with a 227.47fps average at 1080p against the 7700X's 206.4fps. That's mightily playable. Far Cry 6 also takes advantage of the 9700X's increase in single core oomph with a 14 percent performance boost over its predecessor - ironically the same average numbers AMD quoted for the gains in IPC (instructions per clock) for this new chips. In Far Cry 6, we also see the 9700X push Intel's own chips, where the 9700X has languished behind in other games. The 9700X is also rather efficient, with those gaming numbers coming with its base 65W TDP, which makes it less power hungry against the 7700X, which came with a 105W TDP.
We're also seeing AM5 become a much more viable platform to build on, where it had previously been quite expensive due to the cost of well-specced B650 and X670 motherboards and DDR5 RAM. However, as seen in our recent coverage of the Ryzen 5 5600 in 2025, going for an AM5-based system isn't as dear as it used to be, if you aren't already on AM5 of course, thanks to increasingly affordable DDR5 RAM and motherboards.
If you've been after a capable Ryzen 9000 CPU for a fair bit less, this Amazon USA deal on the Ryzen 7 9700X isn't to be missed.