We've said before that AMD's Ryzen 7 3700X is a superb mid-priced option for gaming setups, and the value proposition is even better with this deal. It's marked down to $299.99 over at B&H Photo. That matches the discount we saw during the Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales period.
Simply put, the 3700X is one of the best CPUs for gaming, in terms of the bang-for-buck. It's based on AMD's latest generation Zen 2 CPU architecture, putting you on the cutting edge when paired with an X570 motherboard with PCI Express 4.0 support.
It's a strong processor with 8 cores and 16 threads clocked at 3.6GHz (base) to 4.4GHz (max turbo), with 32MB of L3 cache and a 65W TDP. Compared to Intel's Core i7-9700K, it's about 9 percent slower in gaming, though that's at 1080p with a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. If you buy a sensible GPU (think: Radeon RX 5700 XT or thereabouts), the difference in performance is largely negligible. And outside of gaming, you're looking at about an 18 percent gain in multi-threaded performance, compared to the 9700K.
This CPU also comes with AMD's Wraith Prism RGB cooler. It's good enough to run at stock settings, and should be able to handle a mild overclock as well.