Recently, over the last few years, with Intel picking up many losses in the CPU division, the divide between content creation and gaming has mostly been down to AMD chips with and without 3D V-cache technology.
If you are looking for a dedicated content creation rig, which can also happily handle games, you end up paying a little more but, luckily, with a few sales, you can now get the rather impressive Ryzen 9 9900X at a reasonable price.
At Newegg right now, you can pick up this CPU for $409.99, which is $89.01 cheaper than its full retail price. With a relatively low TDP of 120 W, it's easy to cool and a great workhorse, but it, unfortunately, has a terrible eco mode if you plan on bringing it all the way down to 65 W, being outpaced by much cheaper CPUs. As well as this, the original price puts it way above comparable chips, and it therefore becomes not great for the money. However, this sale puts it in a much more attractive range.
The 9900X performs productivity tasks fantastically, outpacing the Ryzen 9 7900X and Intel Core i9 149000K in single-core CPU rendering but being beaten out by multi-core rendering by Intel's much more expensive chip. If you are considering a Zen 5 station, this CPU is strong for all kinds of encoding, rendering, and editing.
When you move into gaming, this chip's nice specs aren't quite as reflective. It still performs well, roughly matching the Ryzen 7 9700X stats and performing just a little worse than the Intel Core i9 14900K.
When we originally reviewed this CPU, we recommended picking the Ryzen 9 7900X instead, not because it performs poorly but because the price increase wasn't fully reflected in performance gains. With that last-gen CPU now being $398.99 at Newegg, this upgrade makes a lot more sense.
If you want solid but not hugely noteworthy game performance, yet excellent content creation and productivity performance, and you have the AM5 socket to plug this thing in, you won't be disappointed in your upgrade.
