I’ve been scouring the Prime Day deals all day for bargains on PC components. After all, Prime Day can be one of the best times to build or upgrade, or just stash some parts on sale for later. If you’ve been waiting for a proper CPU deal to build your next powerhouse desktop—or to give your current rig a shot of adrenaline—Prime Day has a few big deals out there. Intel’s Core i9-14900K and Core i7-14700K gamer darlings, as a couple of examples, are seeing decent sale pricing. But the Ryzen 9 9950X, the 16-core near-flagship of AMD’s “Zen 5” desktop lineup, has dropped to just $434, a full $240 off its launch MSRP. Excited yet? You should be. (And it was $409 earlier today…maybe it will be again!)

At PCMag, I oversee our component testing processes, as well as the steering and editing of our PC component reviews. So I’ve been through the testing wringer with chips like this for decades now. So, I can say with confidence: This isn’t just a solid CPU deal—it’s the Prime Day CPU deal for anyone looking to upgrade their desktop engine.

The 9950X is a 16-core/32-thread monster processor meant for serious multitasking, content-creation workloads, and heavy lifting of all kinds, so long as the task takes good advantage of multi-threading. Whether you’re rendering 3D models, editing 4K video, or compiling massive codebases (or you just tend to have 50 Chrome tabs open while gaming and streaming), this chip is your bread, your butter, and your jam. AMD did some hard work on the chip-design side with the Ryzen 9000 series to make its top-end chips faster without significantly increasing heat or power draw versus the previous (Ryzen 7000) generation. 

This processor’s been through our full benchmark suite, and it earned not only our Editors’ Choice award, but also laurels as our favorite CPU of 2024 in our Best of the Year awards. And it earned them both for a reason. It regularly beats or ties Intel’s flagship Core i9-14900K in multithreaded tests, while running cooler and consuming less power. Given Intel’s unsteady 2024 with its 13th and 14th Gen Core desktop chips, I’d call the Ryzen 9 9950X the safer long-term bet, too—especially if you are building a PC in a compact case where thermals matter.

(Credit: Michael Justin Allen Sexton)

Gamers may be wondering: Is this a good chip for me, too? Emphatically, yes—but with one asterisk. The even beastlier Ryzen 9 9950X3D, with AMD’s 3D V-Cache tech, offers better gaming performance thanks to its specialized cache component. It’s the one to beat if you are laser-focused on max frame rates at 1080p while using a top-tier GPU. That said, the 9950X3D isn’t discounted right now nearly as drastically as the 9950X is, and its list price is $699. So unless you’re an esports frame-count fanatic or building the absolute ultimate gaming PC with a card like a GeForce RTX 5080 or RTX 5090, the Ryzen 9 9950X at just over $400 is just too luscious to ignore.

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This chip gives you incredible compute muscle for the money, and it runs on the same AM5 socket as AMD’s Ryzen 7000 series, so motherboard and cooler options are already plentiful. Plus, if you’re already on the AMD train, maybe you can upgrade to the 9950X on a motherboard you already use.

In short: Are you a power user, creator, or gamer who needs mega-multi-tasking muscle and future-proofing? Perk up! This Prime Day deal on the 9950X is an easy recommendation. If I didn’t already have a loaded productivity and gaming rig, I’d be snagging one, and its 16 cores, for myself.

Also, be sure to check out more top Prime Day Deal picks from our sibling brands: CNET, Lifehacker, Mashable, and ZDNET.

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About John Burek

Executive Editor and PC Labs Director

I have been a technology journalist for 30-plus years and have covered just about every kind of computer gear—from the 386SX to 64-core processors—in my long tenure as an editor, a writer, and an advice columnist. For almost a quarter-century, I worked on the seminal, gigantic Computer Shopper magazine (and later, its digital counterpart), aka the phone book for PC buyers, and the nemesis of every postal delivery person. I was Computer Shopper’s editor in chief for its final nine years, after which much of its digital content was folded into PCMag.com. I also served, briefly, as the editor in chief of the well-known hard-core tech site Tom’s Hardware.

During that time, I’ve built and torn down enough desktop PCs to equip a city block’s worth of internet cafes. Under race conditions, I’ve built PCs from bare-board to bootup in under 5 minutes.

In my early career, I worked as an editor of scholarly science books, and as an editor of “Dummies”-style computer guidebooks for Brady Books (now, BradyGames). I’m a lifetime New Yorker, a graduate of New York University’s journalism program, and a member of Phi Beta Kappa.

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