AMD Ryzen 7 7700X + MSI B650-P Pro MB + 32GB G.Skill Flare X5 DDR5-6000 Memory Expired

Edit: The price for this bundle has dropped to $350, changing this from a better version of a good deal that's been going on for a while to an absolutely fantastic deal. According to microcenter's website ads these lower bundle prices are from 2/12-2/14. For those who already bought this bundle, microcenter offers price protection, you can find information on their price protection policy here: https://community.microcenter.com...protection

This bundle is best suited for those building a midrange computer who desire a meaningful upgrade path. The 7700x has strong single threaded performance and good power efficiency, but as a single chiplet zen 4 part is lacking in multithreaded performance compared similarly priced intel cpus. Those who require a cpu with strong multithreaded performance for non-gaming productivity workloads (photo/video editing, code compiling, cpu based 3d rendering, etc.) would be best served by purchasing a dual chiplet amd cpu (ryzen 7900 or up) or an intel cpu (which have significantly higher multithreaded performance towards the lower end of their product stack compared to single chiplet amd cpus) according to their needs. Those whose use cases involve video encoding/transcoding would be best served purchasing an intel cpu with an integrated gpu to make use of intel quicksync.

The 7700x is an 8 core zen 4 cpu on the current gen am5 platform. It has strong single threaded and competent gaming performance, but as mentioned above is lacking in terms of multithreaded performance. Fortunately, the vast majority of users won't require multithreaded performance beyond what the 7700x offers. The 7700x is highly competent for standard office productivity, gaming, web surfing, content consumption, etc. While it's gaming performance isn't top tier, it's slightly faster on average than the 5800x3d and i9-12900k. In terms of power usage and efficiency, the 7700x is significantly less power hungry and easier to cool compared to comparable intel cpus.
Hardware unboxed reviewing the 7700x: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-P_iii5si40

The motherboard in this bundle is a lower midrange full size atx b650 chipset am5 motherboard. It is moderately worse overall compared to the gigabyte board included in the microcenter 7800x3d bundle, though it has a better vrm. This board has: the low (but not lowest) end b650 chipset, a 12+2+1 75A vrm, four pcie x16 slots (1x gen4 x16 primary slot, 1x gen4 x4, 2x gen3 x1), two m.2 slots (2x gen4 x4), six sata ports, Realtek 8125BG 2.5G LAN, AMD Wi-Fi 6E + Bluetooth 5.3, a competent assortment of usb including usb 3.2 gen2, and bios flashback. While it has many of the compromises you'd expect from a cheaper board (6 layer pcb, cheap realtek audio chip, no pcie gen 5 support, only two m.2 slots, somewhat limited io, etc), it's overall reasonably competent and should be sufficient for the vast majority of users. The lack of a pcie gen 5 x16 slot will be meaningless (excluding a few very niche applications) for a few years at least. The lack of a gen5 m.2 slot may be more relevant in coming years depending on how prevalent directstorage becomes as it matures, but at this price the lack of pcie gen 5 shouldn't be a major concern. There have been complaints about slow boot times on msi b650 boards, supposedly newer bios updates have mitigated those issues, and memory context restore can generally be enabled without issue to drastically reduce boot times. One of the primary advantage of building a computer on the am5 platform is that it will have a meaningful upgrade path. At the absolute minimum, next gen amd zen 5 cpus will be on the am5 platform (and very likely zen6 as well), which means you'll be able to slot in a one or two generation newer cpu without needing to replace your motherboard. This is obviously a major cost savings.
Here's the motherboard's official specs page: https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/P...cification
And here's the manual: https://download.msi.com/archive/...-PWIFI.pdf

The ram in this bundle is a marked improvement over the ram included in previous bundles. While the better cas latency (cl32 instead of cl36) shouldn't cause a major difference in performance under standard use, this ram kit uses hynix memory chips instead of samsung memory chips. Hynix memory chips are superior in just about every way, and all high end ddr5 kits (6000 cl32 and better) exclusively use hynix chips. The am5 platform has had compatibility issues with samsung based memory in the past, while those issues have been mostly fixed in bios updates hynix memory has been significantly more stable on am5 since day one. The primary advantage of hynix memory kits is that they have far superior overclocking potential. If you're willing to manually overclock/tune your memory you can achieve an absolutely massive increase in performance compared to a similarly tuned samsung memory kit. Even if you don't intend to overclock or tune your ram beyond stock expo settings, this ram will be slightly faster and likely more stable than the ram included in previous bundles.

Overall, if you're looking to build a midrange computer in the near term, and having a meaningful upgrade path is valuable to you, at $350 this is a fantastic deal.

Might want to call out this feature with a little more emphasis. AMD has been generous in inclusion of a functional (if not necessarily super-performing) heatsink across so many models. Those few midrange and higher-performance models which don't include a heatsink often deserve highlighting this omission (arguably these models target enthusiasts likely to invest in a high-performance cooling solution).

Good luck!
Jon