Item 1 of 4
Item 1 of 4
expiredBeigeRoad455 posted Jul 28, 2023 6:57 PM
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+ Free Store Pickupat Micro Center
Deal Details
Micro Center has CPU/Motherboard/RAM Computer Build Bundle on sale for $549.99. Select free store pickup where available.
Thanks to community member BeigeRoad455 for finding this deal.
Note: Availability may vary by location.
Bundle Includes:
Thanks to community member BeigeRoad455 for finding this deal.
Note: Availability may vary by location.
Bundle Includes:
- AMD Ryzen 9 7900X Raphael AM5 4.7GHz 12-Core Boxed Processor (Heatsink Not Included)
- ASUS B650E-F ROG STRIX GAMING WIFI AMD AM5 ATX Motherboard
- 64GB G.Skill Flare X5 Series (2 x 32GB) DDR5-6000 PC5-48000 CL30 Dual Channel Desktop Memory Kit F5-6000J3040G32GX2-FX5 (Black)
Editor's Notes
Written by oceanlake- This price is $377.97 lower (41% savings) than the list price.
- See the forum thread for additional discussion of this deal.
- Get 1%-5% cash back on deals like this with a cash back credit card. Compare the available cash back credit cards here.
Community Notes
About the Poster
Deal Details
Community Notes
About the Poster
Micro Center has CPU/Motherboard/RAM Computer Build Bundle on sale for $549.99. Select free store pickup where available.
Thanks to community member BeigeRoad455 for finding this deal.
Note: Availability may vary by location.
Bundle Includes:
Thanks to community member BeigeRoad455 for finding this deal.
Note: Availability may vary by location.
Bundle Includes:
- AMD Ryzen 9 7900X Raphael AM5 4.7GHz 12-Core Boxed Processor (Heatsink Not Included)
- ASUS B650E-F ROG STRIX GAMING WIFI AMD AM5 ATX Motherboard
- 64GB G.Skill Flare X5 Series (2 x 32GB) DDR5-6000 PC5-48000 CL30 Dual Channel Desktop Memory Kit F5-6000J3040G32GX2-FX5 (Black)
Editor's Notes
Written by oceanlake- This price is $377.97 lower (41% savings) than the list price.
- See the forum thread for additional discussion of this deal.
- Get 1%-5% cash back on deals like this with a cash back credit card. Compare the available cash back credit cards here.
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Top Comments
Regardless, even if allowed to run unchecked with default power settings, a 7900x will still be easier to cool than intel competitors such as the i7-13700k, and air cooling is entirely viable. I highly recommend the thermalright peerless assassin air cooler, it matches up favorably against most top tier air coolers and only costs ~$35.
Edit:
Thermalright actually released a new successor to the peerless assassin, called the phantom spirit. Now that it's been out for a few months, and has been extensively reviewed, since it seems to be a bit better for zen 4 cpus at around the same price I'd recommend the phantom spirit instead as long as it's around $40 or under.
Here's a link to a review of a variety of coolers with zen 4 cpus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-wxHtELX5s
Edit: I just realized you probably meant the last gen i9-12900k that's part of a popular microcenter bundle, so I'll also give my thoughts on it. The i9-12900k is essentially a worse i7-13700k with a less refined architecture and less cache. Its gaming performance is slightly below to almost on par with the 7700x, and its multithreaded performance is significantly better than the 7700x, though inferior to the 7900x. Like all 12th gen and beyond intel cpus it is significantly less power efficient than the ryzen 7000 series, using significantly more power and generating far more heat. It definitely needs a very powerful air cooler or liquid cooling. The intel platform also lacks a meaningful upgrade path (the current socket will end with 14th gen raptor lake refresh).
With regards to the i9, I assume you're referring to the i9-13900k. The 13900k is a top tier cpu in both gaming and multithreaded productivity performance; outstripping the 7700x by a decent margin in gaming, and significantly beating the 7900x in multithreaded performance. On the other hand, it is significantly more expensive than either. Additionally, it is far less power efficient, using an enormous amount of power and producing such a tremendous amount of heat that liquid cooling is almost a necessity.
The 7700x is a good all around lower mid-range cpu that's best for people on a tighter budget who will not do anything more cpu intensive than gaming on their computer. Due to only having 8 cores it has significantly worse multithreaded performance compared to the i5-13600k and especially the i7-13700k. While 8 cores should be sufficient for gaming in the near term, it's quite possible that in the next 5 years or so unreal engine 5 games and next gen console ports may be able to take advantage of additional threads. This is obviously just a possibility, but I still personally would opt for a greater than 8 core cpu if you have the budget to spare and are planning to keep the cpu for at least 5 years.
The 7900x is an upper mid-range cpu that approximately matches the 7700x in gaming performance and is massively superior in multithreaded performance. This makes it a good option for those who use there computers for more than gaming but don't feel the need to pay a large premium for top of the line productivity performance. As a dual ccd design inter-ccd latency marginally reduces gaming performance, however higher clock speeds almost completely compensate. Due to having 12 cores it is likely to age better than the 7700x, and it should also hold its value somewhat better should you decide to upgrade your cpu in a few years and sell your old one.
Moving on to cpu performance, this bundle will be equal to or better than the 7700x in essentially every single possible use case, so you don't need to worry about the 7700x being better in gaming. The 7900x is within 1 or 2 percentage points of the 7700x in gaming performance with the same ram, and the better ram will likely make it flat out faster even in gaming. With regards to multithreaded performance the 7900x absolutely annihilates the 7700x, having 50% more cpu cores. If you do anything more cpu intensive than only gaming, or intend to keep this cpu for more than 5+ years, I highly recommend the 7900x.
With regards to the motherboard, the asus b650e-f is significantly better overall compared to the MSI B650-P PRO. Most importantly, the much cheaper msi board completely lacks pcie gen 5 support, while the asus b650e-f has both a pcie gen 5 ssd slot and a pcie gen 5 x16 slot.
Moving on to ram, the 7900x bundle comes with twice as much, 64gb as opposed to 32gb. Most people won't make much use of 64gb of ram, unless they're doing productivity workloads, but it certainly doesn't hurt to have more, and if you're willing to experiment there's some interesting things you can do such as utilizing ram disks. More importantly, this ram is cl30 meaning it has better performance, and utilizes hynix memory chips as opposed to the samsung chips in the cl36 ram the 7700x bundle includes. Hynix memory chips are better in just about every way, being more reliable, stable, and better for overclocking. Considering how appalling the ratings and reviews of the 32gb of cl36 ram are, I personally think the better ram is a major improvement to the value proposition. To be clear, most of the issues with the samsung cl36 ram were due to incompatibility issues, those have already been fixed but it took over 6 months for bios fixes to be released. On current bios revisions with updated agesa that ram now appears to no longer have the prolific issues it previously had. However, I've still seen higher than average mention of users who've had that ram fail after several months even after the fixes have been released, and even before fixes were released some ram kits had no issues and some were completely broken, even when running on the same hardware. This leads me to suspect that the samsung memory chips utilized in that microcenter specific sku that is given away for free are poorly binned chips of subpar quality.
Overall, if you have the budget to spare I highly recommend the 7900x bundle as it is a better value overall and will likely have greater longevity. If you ONLY use your pc for gaming and that $150 premium significantly cuts into your overall budget for your entire build, to the point it knocks your gpu down a tier, I'd go with the 7700x bundle.
I went into more detail on certain points in various posts throughout this thread, so if you want even more information feel free to peruse those.
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209 Comments
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Our community has rated this post as helpful. If you agree, why not thank BeigeRoad455
Edit: I just realized you probably meant the last gen i9-12900k that's part of a popular microcenter bundle, so I'll also give my thoughts on it. The i9-12900k is essentially a worse i7-13700k with a less refined architecture and less cache. Its gaming performance is slightly below to almost on par with the 7700x, and its multithreaded performance is significantly better than the 7700x, though inferior to the 7900x. Like all 12th gen and beyond intel cpus it is significantly less power efficient than the ryzen 7000 series, using significantly more power and generating far more heat. It definitely needs a very powerful air cooler or liquid cooling. The intel platform also lacks a meaningful upgrade path (the current socket will end with 14th gen raptor lake refresh).
With regards to the i9, I assume you're referring to the i9-13900k. The 13900k is a top tier cpu in both gaming and multithreaded productivity performance; outstripping the 7700x by a decent margin in gaming, and significantly beating the 7900x in multithreaded performance. On the other hand, it is significantly more expensive than either. Additionally, it is far less power efficient, using an enormous amount of power and producing such a tremendous amount of heat that liquid cooling is almost a necessity.
The 7700x is a good all around lower mid-range cpu that's best for people on a tighter budget who will not do anything more cpu intensive than gaming on their computer. Due to only having 8 cores it has significantly worse multithreaded performance compared to the i5-13600k and especially the i7-13700k. While 8 cores should be sufficient for gaming in the near term, it's quite possible that in the next 5 years or so unreal engine 5 games and next gen console ports may be able to take advantage of additional threads. This is obviously just a possibility, but I still personally would opt for a greater than 8 core cpu if you have the budget to spare and are planning to keep the cpu for at least 5 years.
The 7900x is an upper mid-range cpu that approximately matches the 7700x in gaming performance and is massively superior in multithreaded performance. This makes it a good option for those who use there computers for more than gaming but don't feel the need to pay a large premium for top of the line productivity performance. As a dual ccd design inter-ccd latency marginally reduces gaming performance, however higher clock speeds almost completely compensate. Due to having 12 cores it is likely to age better than the 7700x, and it should also hold its value somewhat better should you decide to upgrade your cpu in a few years and sell your old one.
I will see if they will allow me to return the 32 and get the 64GB instead.
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Regardless, even if allowed to run unchecked with default power settings, a 7900x will still be easier to cool than intel competitors such as the i7-13700k, and air cooling is entirely viable. I highly recommend the thermalright peerless assassin air cooler, it matches up favorably against most top tier air coolers and only costs ~$35.
Edit:
Thermalright actually released a new successor to the peerless assassin, called the phantom spirit. Now that it's been out for a few months, and has been extensively reviewed, since it seems to be a bit better for zen 4 cpus at around the same price I'd recommend the phantom spirit instead as long as it's around $40 or under.
Here's a link to a review of a variety of coolers with zen 4 cpus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-wxHtELX5s
Regardless, even if allowed to run unchecked with default power settings, a 7900x will still be easier to cool than intel competitors such as the i7-13700k, and air cooling is entirely viable. I highly recommend the thermalright peerless assassin air cooler, it matches up favorably against most top tier air coolers and only costs ~$35.
I got the 7700x combo reserved but leaning towards this combo as I prefer a better mobo. Better ram and cpu won't hurt.
edit: they updated the support page on the 24th to show the latest BIOS
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This is exactly the combo I've been looking for a deal on, more or less. I'd be flexible with another B650 or X670 mobo, and pretty much any decent 6k mhz+ 32g-64g kit of ram to go with it, but the exact CPU I've been eyeing lately with required hardware to boot. Of course, it would happen to go on sale somewhere I'd have to get it b&m only, at a store too far to make it economically viable or at all practical.
Regardless, even if allowed to run unchecked with default power settings, a 7900x will still be easier to cool than intel competitors such as the i7-13700k, and air cooling is entirely viable. I highly recommend the thermalright peerless assassin air cooler, it matches up favorably against most top tier air coolers and only costs ~$35.
Now if I can only find a decent deal on a 7900X + B650 or X670 mobo nearby or online, ram or not. I can always buy that separate.
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I got the 7700x combo reserved but leaning towards this combo as I prefer a better mobo. Better ram and cpu won't hurt.
I do have the same 32gb set passing with memtest86 with expo on
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Our community has rated this post as helpful. If you agree, why not thank BeigeRoad455
Moving on to the the memory, I highly recommend enabling amd expo. Ryzen 7000 series processors are designed to run best with ram at a speed of ddr5-6000, since that enables an 1:1 IFC ratio. Basically, by running the ram at a speed of 6000 you ensure both the ram and the memory controller on the cpu are running at the same speed, which improves performance and stability. Since zen 4 cpus are extremely sensitive to memory speed and latency, leaving expo off could easily be reducing your fps in games by over 10%!
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