Amazon’s Spring Sale rumbles on, and in its final days in the ‘States, it’s knocked a staggering 37% off one of the beefier processors in AMD’s current lineup – the 12 core/24 thread Ryzen 9 9900X. At $315 from Amazon USA, it’s dropped to a new low price from the big online retailer down from a previous price of $370 or thereabouts, although Amazon is stating a bigger 37% discount on its $499 list price.

We haven’t actually looked at the 9900X itself, so will lean on the extensive testing from Will at Eurogamer, which is quite revealing. On its release, this chip didn’t perform as well as he expected, although a retest in a subsequent 9950X3D review yielded much stronger performance, with comfortable leads over the 8-core Ryzen 7 9600X and over this chip’s predecessor, the 7900X. It works out to around an eight percent lead in the notoriously CPU-intensive Flight Simulator 2020 at 1080p, while the 9900X pulls further ahead in F1 24 and Counter Strike 2 towards a fifteen percent lead.

Content creation results were stronger initially, with a single core improvement of around 15 percent over the older 7900X and an 11 percent increase in multi-core numbers in Cinebench. With this in mind, there were only single digit percentages separating the 9900X and the 7900X in our Handbrake test. Intel’s i7-14700K (itself one of the best gaming CPUs out there) did prove to be a faster choice in Cinebench, but the 9900X nonetheless remains a potent option for rendering and video transcoding, with it also posting a good fps number in the Handbrake video encoding test.

You don’t get a cooler in the box of the 9900X, which isn’t a surprise for a higher end chip, although with only a 120W TDP, it’s more efficient with its power than you might think. Therefore, you won’t need t go mad with the choice of cooling method, be it a tower air cooler or an AIO. With this price tag in mind, it’s also going to be a good upgrade target if you need more grunt on an existing AM5 system, or a fantastic place to start if you want a strong blend of gaming and content creation performance in a contextually inexpensive package.

If you want to grab a beefy AM5 CPU at a new low price, this Amazon USA for the Spring Sale deal on the Ryzen 9 9900X is well worth your time.