AMD’s workstation-grade Ryzen 9 5950X is going for £527 – with an 850W power supply

The Ryzen 9 5950X is a magnificent CPU that manages to deliver top-tier gaming performance while having enough cores (32) and threads (64) to be an incredibly strong workstation too – and now it’s on sale.

CCL in the UK are offering it for £516 for the CPU alone, but you can also combine a discount code and CCL’s bundling mechanism to get an even better deal on the 5950X and a Corsair 850W power supply – the ultimate starting point for a content creation workstation that also doubles as a high-end gaming PC.

To get the deal, first spotted by HUKD user Hunter68, you’ll want to add each of the two items to your basket via the links below, then use the SAVE30 code to get the final discounted price of £527 – just a tad over the current Amazon price of £495 and a massive bargain given the Corsair RM850X retails for £92.

While this is a great deal, I wouldn’t recommend the 5950X to everyone. The six-core Ryzen 5 5600X and its recent counterpart, the 5600, are the best AMD CPUs for gaming given their much lower price point. Similarly, the Ryzen 7 5700X, 5800X and 5800X3D all ratchet up the gaming performance while also packing in eight cores instead of six. Either way you go, you’re getting extremely strong single-core performance and enough cores for modern games at a much lower price than that of the 5950X.

Instead, where the 5950X shines is in content creation. Having this many cores and threads massively accelerates any task that can be broken down into lots of smaller tasks that then run concurrently on the CPU. Think about transcoding a video file into a different format. You could do each frame one by one, but equally you could split the video up into as many pieces as your CPU has threads, then work on them at the same time to finish much sooner. Your CPU will spend a bit of extra time chopping up the task and then joining up the results compared to the sequential way, but you’ll still be finished way quicker even if your CPU has only two threads. And obviously modern CPUs have many more threads than this – 12 on the Ryzen 5 models, 16 on the Ryzen 7, 24 on the Ryzen 9 5900X and 32 on the ridiculous 5950X. So you get a fantastic speedup in these sorts of tasks, far beyond the increase you’d expect when playing even cleverly designed modern games.

That power has made the 5950X a favorite among YouTubers and 3D modellers – I don’t know about the RPS video team, but I know that a good percentage of the Digital Foundry squad are using 5950X systems to render out their videos. So if you’re a similar line of work that benefits from having a lot of fast cores, like programming, 3D modelling, data science, video production and so on, then this is a fastest cracking deal on the AMD Ryzen CPU available.