At basically $105, the Ryzen 5 7600X is the best gaming CPU to buy right now

I don’t usually get my hopes up for Black Friday CPU deals, but I found one that’s just too good to pass up. Right now, you can get the Ryzen 5 7600X — still one of the best processors for value-focused gaming — for basically $105. No, that’s not the actual price listed on Newegg where you’ll find the deal, but there’s a lot going on with this sale.

For starters, the CPU itself is marked down by 24%, bringing the $299 list price down to $225. Not a great deal for a last-gen chip. However, you can save an additional $30 by using the promo code BFEDY2A33, and more importantly, you’ll get a free Kingston NV3 1TB hard drive with the order. That’s a PCIe 4.0 SSD that normally costs $90.

This is, without a doubt, the craziest deal I’ve seen so far. I keep looking over the listing to see if I missed anything, but I didn’t. The price of the Ryzen 5 7600X isn’t bad when you factor in the promo code, but the fact that you’re getting the $90 drive (already a great price) for free is just insane.

Now, I know. AMD just released its Ryzen 5 9600X, which is also on sale for about $240. As you can read in our Ryzen 5 9600X review, the newer chip isn’t significantly faster than the Ryzen 5 7600X, and the performance gains become even more negligible when more than $100 separates the two CPUs.

Moreover, the Ryzen 5 7600X is based on AMD’s AM5 socket. The company has said it will support this socket until at least 2027, so you’ll be able to upgrade your CPU without changing out your motherboard and memory down the line. We’ve already seen Ryzen 9000 launch on the platform, and we’ll get at least one more generation — and possibly two.

As a six-core CPU, the Ryzen 5 7600X doesn’t have a ton of grunt in productivity applications, especially stacked up against flagships like the Ryzen 9 9950X and Core Ultra 9 285K. However, it’s a monster when it comes to gaming. Most games don’t call for more than six cores, and in the few that do, the Ryzen 5 7600X still puts up impressive results. Those results are even more impressive when the CPU is basically $105.