Black Friday’s best PC hardware deal is still live, and you’re sleeping on it

By Jacob Roach Published December 5, 2024

I’m not mad, just disappointed. A couple of weeks ago, I covered the insane deal that essentially allowed you to score a Ryzen 5 7600X — still one of the best processors you can buy — for just $105. At the time, I thought, surely, this will sell out in a matter of hours. Who would pass up on a deal this good? And yet, two weeks later to the day, the craziest deal I’ve seen during all of Black Friday and Cyber Monday is still live on Newegg.

Let me break down the deal again. You can get the Ryzen 5 7600X for $225, which is not a good price. However, you can get an additional $30 off by using promo code DLCDZ342, bringing the price down to $195. The kicker is that you also get a free Team Group MP44L 1TB PCIe 4.0 SSD. That’s a $90 hard drive that Newegg is just throwing in with a CPU that’s already available for a decent price. The fact that the deal is still live suggests either Newegg has a ton of inventory, or not enough people know about this sale.

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I’m assuming it’s the latter because Newegg isn’t doing a great job of pushing this deal. The Ryzen 5 7600X is listed among all of the other PC components on sale, but the linchpin of the deal — the free 1TB hard drive — isn’t brought to the forefront. I suppose that’s my job.

The Ryzen 5 7600X is still a great gaming CPU, even in the face of the newer (and faster) Ryzen 5 9600X. That CPU is available for about $250, and although that’s a decent price, it doesn’t come anywhere close to the deal on the last-gen CPU. As you can read in my Ryzen 5 9600X review, AMD latest budget offering isn’t significantly faster than the Ryzen 5 7600X, particularly when it comes to gaming. The Ryzen 5 9600X shows big gains in productivity applications, but let’s be honest — either of these six-core CPUs aren’t the best when it comes to crushing productivity workloads.

Gaming is where this CPU shines most, and that’s backed up by our own testing. With a decent graphics card, you’ll rarely run into a game that the Ryzen 5 7600X can’t handle. Even in 2024, most games still primarily use one thread for game logic and another for rendering. There are some games that see slightly higher performance with eight cores, but only with an extreme CPU bottleneck. And even then, the differences are in the low single digits.

You really don’t need a lot of CPU power for a good gaming experience, especially if you’re playing at higher resolutions. Even in my personal PC, where I have an RTX 4090 installed, I’m using a Ryzen 7 9700X. I’d probably be using a Ryzen 5 if I didn’t occasionally need to pop into Photoshop and Premiere Pro.

There really isn’t another CPU that can match the deal on the Ryzen 5 7600X right now. The closest I could find was the Core i5-12600K, which is available for $150 , but that CPU is much slower than AMD’s offering. Assuming you need a little extra storage — and, honestly, who doesn’t? — you’d be foolish to pass up on the Ryzen 5 7600X for this price.