The capable AMD Ryzen 7 9700X just hit its best price in months at Amazon

AMD's Ryzen 9000 series arrived with a lot of fanfare but not too much in terms of an overall performance against their predecessors. They are still generally better chips, and can be had for decent money now they've been out for a little bit of time, making for a much more compelling option if you want to change over to AM5 from an older system, or want to upgrade your existing rig to the latest generation.

For instance, this mid-range Ryzen 7 9700X, with its eight cores and 16 threads, has hit its lowest price in literal months at £255 from Amazon, making for a fantastic deal on a capable AM5 processor.

AMD Ryzen 7 9700X Now £254.99 (was £323.99) See at Amazon UK

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 deal on the Ryzen 7 9700X isn't to be missed.