Amazon has knocked $30 off the sticker price of AMD's Ryzen 7 1800X processor

Let the PC builds begin. Right now, Amazon is selling the top-of-the-line Ryzen 7 1800X for $470, or $30 off the sticker price. That’s one of the best deals we’ve seen so far among the big retailers. Note that this discount isn’t tied to any particular sale, so it could disappear at any time.

The 1800X is an eight-core, 16-thread processor with a 3.60GHz base clock and an amazing 95W TDP. At $499, the 1800X was already a better deal than Intel’s comparably powerful Skylake CPU, the Core i7-6900K, which is a plus-$1,000 processor with a TDP of 140W.

In our Ryzen review, the 1800X matched or beat the 6900K on a number of benchmark performances. The one thing to be aware of is that AMD’s Ryzen 7 still isn’t quite as fast as Intel processors when it comes to gaming. They’ll do just fine, however, and the story is more complicated than we can cover here. Check out our full discussion of gaming and Ryzen from early March for more details.

Nevertheless, the Ryzen 7 1800X is an impressive chip that will serve most users well. Also, don’t forget to pick up a CPU cooler as this processor doesn’t come with a stock cooler in the box. As we mentioned last time, for a quality cooler at a good price check out the Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo.

Gordon Mah Ung

[ Today’s deal: Ryzen 7 1800X for $470 at Amazon ]