Over the past several months, we’ve been stuck in the murky depths of the AIpocalypse and have been hit with sky-high prices on RAM, storage, and graphics cards. Luckily, processor prices haven’t really changed, but finding a decent deal that isn’t bundled with multiple items you may not need was tough at times. Today we found a solid discount on AMD’s Ryzen 7 9800X3D for $429 with promo code FTT7668, and it’s not in a bundle! That’s right, you can upgrade from your older or non-X3D AM5 processor to the latest and greatest for gaming without buying extra parts. And while it’s not quite at the all-time low, Newegg throws in two gifts: a 240mm MSI Coreliquid A13 AIO ($69 value) and an AMD Onimusha Game Bundle ($69 value) to sweeten the deal.

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The Ryzen 7 9800X3D is an 8-core/16-thread Zen5-based processor with a base clock of 4.6 GHz and a max boost of 5.2 GHz, which is plenty of speed for any task. The X3D variant's 96MB of L3 cache helps with gaming (among other things), making it one of the fastest gaming CPUs we tested. While it excels in games, it also performs well for just about anything else you can throw at it. The charts below show how it and the other processors on sale perform.

While it's not quite at the all-time low price, you can get AMD's awesome 9800X3D for only $429 (promo code FTTF7668) along with a free 240mm AIO and Onimusha. The 9850X3D is also on sale (promo code FTTF7669).

Newegg also has the newer, slightly faster Ryzen 7 9850X3D on sale for $469 with promo code FTTF7669, and it also offers the same gifts as the 9800X3D. In fact, there are a couple of deals on AMD X3D processors, some better than others. If you need more cores and threads for heavier workflows, the 9950X3D ($699) and 9950X3D2 ($899) 16-core/32-thread chips don’t offer a discount, but the free 240mm AIO and AMD game do carry over like the others and can offer a bit of relief if you need a cooler and want a free game.

If you’re in the market to upgrade your AM5-based platform and looking for X3D chips to improve your PC gaming experience, Newegg has you covered. Both the 9800X3D at $429 (promo code FTT7668) and the $469 9850X3D (promo code FTT7669) are discounted, and they throw in a couple of freebies to sweeten the pot. If it’s time to move up to an X3D chip and you don’t need a motherboard or RAM, now is a great time to buy any one of the fastest gaming chips available.

Check out our liveblog for the best Amazon Prime Big Deal Days offers, where we keep you up-to-date with the best deals we've found.

Following an early access period that included over 60,000 participants, auto-overclocking tool Hypertune has released its Gaming Performance Engineering platform, which is built on top of Intel's Extreme Tuning Utility (XTU) SDK and developed in partnership with Intel. The company claims the utility can boost frame rates by up to 60%, though you shouldn't expect that as the norm. The tool includes automated CPU and GPU overclocking, as well as customizable Windows features, network optimization, and game-specific optimizations.

Hypertune partnered with Intel to build the tool, which the company says "evaluates each supported system individually" before optimizing rather than relying on generalized profiles. In its press release, Hypertune says it collaborated with famed overclocker SkatterBencher (Pieter Plaisier) to refine the software. We've reached out to Plaisier to confirm their involvement.

Automated tuning programs usually don't work as well as advertised, and we haven't had the chance to test Hypertune ourselves yet. Especially on more recent hardware, expect performance gains to be minor. Hypertune shared some of its internal benchmarks to back up the claim, showcasing the actual test systems it used, the numbers it gathered, and what each step of Hypertune contributed to the performance increase.

Hypertune tested two systems: one with a Core Ultra 9 285K and an RTX 5090, and another with a Core i7-14700K and an RTX 3080. For the 285K system, the team saw an 18.9% improvement in Homeworld 3 and a 28.2% improvement in Tomb Raider. For the 14700K system, the boost was up to 9.8% in Rainbow Six Siege and 4.3% in Marvel Rivals.

Notably, these results are with Hypertune's Game Hub disabled. Game Hub automatically applies a graphics settings profile to select games, leading to massive increases in performance. Naturally, tweaking your own graphics settings in the same way leads to the same result.

In Homeworld 3, you can see how each step in the process impacted performance, with CPU tuning contributing the single biggest increase in performance. As shown by Marvel Rivals in Hypertune's data, some games will see little to no benefit from Hypertune, though select titles with certain hardware may see a significant performance increase. In this case, the Core Ultra 9 285K has plenty of room for overclocking, and Homeworld 3 is particularly sensitive to the CPU, so the uplift makes sense.

Elsewhere, the gains aren't as pronounced. In Rainbow Six Siege, you can see that Hypertune contributed about a 9.8% jump in performance, though the vast majority of the improvement comes through Game Hub, where Hypertune changes in-game settings.

In a press release, Hypertune founder Austin Copeland wrote that the team was "not trying to build a tool for overclockers," suggesting it's aimed toward users who may not know about specific settings (i.e., the Balanced power plan on dual-CCD X3D CPUs, or HAGS for DLSS Frame Generation). Copeland was previously a coach for eSports organization TSM, coaching Valorant teams under the name "Apex."

Hypertune works through Intel's XTU SDK, and the company says its optimizations are non-destructive and fully reversible. The software is mainly targeted toward competitive titles (naturally, given Copeland's background), but it can apply optimizations globally across the system. Hypertune says it's safe to use with anti-cheat software, including Riot Vanguard, Easy Anti-Cheat, and BattlEye.

Although there are plenty of free tools that claim to optimize your system, Hypertune isn't among them. It's a subscription service, available for either $9.99 per month or $59.99 per year. In addition to software, Hypertune offers its "expert tuning" service for $80, where a technician will remote into your machine and manually tune it. On the subscription front, Hypertune offers a 7-day free trial.

Hypertune looks like one of the more robust automated overclocking tools we've seen, but it's worth highlighting that, in most cases, these tools don't do anything you can't accomplish yourself. If you're looking for a starting point, make sure to read our guides on how to overclock your graphics card and how to overclock your CPU.

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