AMD’s forgotten middle child of the gaming-optimized Ryzen 9000X3D family is on a serious discount, and can now be had at the same price-per-core as the Ryzen 9 9950X3D. AMD’s 12-core Ryzen 9 9900X3D is $499.99 on Amazon — a 17% discount from its usual $599.00 price point, and making it just $50 more expensive than the highly-acclaimed Ryzen 7 9800X3D, but with 50% more cores that help it chew through productivity tasks. If you find that you need an X3D chip with more than eight cores for work and play but don’t have the cash to step up to the Ryzen 9 9950X3D, don’t sleep on this deal.
The Ryzen 9 9900X3D is the middle child in the Ryzen 9000 family, sandwiched between the Ryzen 7 9800X3D and the flagship Ryzen 9 9950X3D. The 12-core part boasts a maximum boost clock of 5.5GHz, and 128MB of L3 cache in total spread across two compute dies. Just like AMD’s other dual CCD X3D parts, the 9900X3D only has 3D V-Cache on one of its dies and uses software scheduling to ensure that all gaming tasks are loaded exclusively onto the V-Cache die to maximize performance.
The 9900X3D outperforms all of Intel’s competing chips in gaming, since Intel still does not have a solution (yet) to fight AMD’s 3D V-Cache technology. In our review, we found the 9900X3D doesn’t provide the same level of class-leading gaming performance as its bigger and smaller family members (lagging behind the 9800X3D by 7% on average, but still putting up an impressive showing nonetheless), and outperforms all of AMD’s previous generation Zen 4-based X3D chips by a similar margin.
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(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)
Workstation performance is also solid. In SPECworkstation 4’s benchmark suite, we saw the 9900X3D generally performing within the ballpark of AMD’s previous-gen 16-core Ryzen 9 7950X3D, Intel’s Core i9-14900K, and Core Ultra 9 285K.
The only problem we had with the Ryzen 9 9900X3D was its $600 MSRP, which was too high at the time for the performance it offers. This problem was exacerbated by its dual CCD design, which features two eight-core CCDs with two cores disabled per CCD. This effectively turns the 9900X3D into a theoretical Ryzen 5 9600X3D while gaming, hindering its gaming performance compared to the 9800X3D.
Amazon’s 17% price drop for AMD’s 12-core Zen 5 3D-VCache processor fixes this problem. At just $499, the Ryzen 9 9900X3D is a much more attractive offering and arguably one of the best CPU choices on the market right now if you are looking for a chip that boasts class-leading gaming performance and high levels of multi-core performance at the same time. The 9900X3D isn’t for everyone, especially full-time gamers, but for power users and productivity users who need 12 cores, it’s hard to beat for $499.
If you’re looking for more savings, check out our Best PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, or CPU Deals pages.
