Pros: This thing is a beast. Don't trust FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) websites claiming this is a "dud"... these things are quite fast and handle anything you throw at it. Call of Duty 4? Sure, no problem. Crysis? Hah, pair it up with a 3850 or two, and bam you'll get between 35 - 50 fps easily under high detail (as long as you don't throw crazy resolutions at it, like 10,000 x 12,000 or something nuts like the FUD websites do, jeez, just try it on 1024 x 768 and you'll see) Should scale well to between 2.5 = 2.7 ghz depending on your luck of the draw.

Cons: Well, the fact that motherboard manufacturers don't do a top notch job with quality control. I had 4 RMA'd boards. One worked 3 weeks then crapped out, another one had a bad DIMM solder, another one had a bad fan control and made the processor overheat, and another one had 1 bad diode. 1. finally switched motherboards (gigabyte sucks) and went with MSI K9A2 platinum. Not trying to shamelessly plug them but man they have better customer support than Gigabyte do. Trust me on that. Plus you get 4 PCIe lanes rather than just 2, for a cheaper price.

Overall Review: I should have bought the MSI board first but Newegg was sold out of them for almost 2 months it seemed like so I had to get my MSI board from another place. I got the rest of my stuff from newegg, and if I could have gotten the MSI board from Newegg I would have but I couldn't wait. My setup works great: Phenom 9600 BE stock heatsink+fan (idle temps 24 C, load 34) MSI K9A2 Platinum board ATI 3850 Give it a try but do your homework first, and also be aware most boards don't fully support 1066 DDR2, and I suggest against RAM voltages higher than 1.8v, or maybe 1.9v. 2.0v is pushing it, anything higher could fry your system (most motherboard/RAM manufacturers don't make a point to tell you in big letters, kind of slack on the manufacturers of the boards and RAM parts but whatever)

Pros: AM2+ support (sort of), Heatpipes. 790FX Crossfire support.

Cons: If you're lucky, you get revision 3. If you're unlucky you get revision 1 or revision 2. I had to RMA this board twice and this will be my third time. I'm really depressed. Won't work with phenom black edition without revision 3 I assume. Seems to have a ton of problems, fan control sucks, one RMA was due to bad bios (DOA board), one RMA was due to overheating, this one is due to bad DDR2 soldering (2 pins are faulty)

Overall Review: Had I known there were this many issues with the board I'd have waited. I don't know man I'm just depressed because I spent a lot of money on this. I'm trying to see what I can work out with Gigabyte on this one, hopefully they'll replace it without circumstance with an F3 revision because I'm about to rip my hair out over this.

Pros: Cheap but powerful upgrade. Quality product, even if it is basically 5800x3ds that couldn't cut it and got rebranded, still very powerful. Worthwhile upgrade if you're on 1000, 2000 or 3000 chips and want to save some money. These 5000 series x3d chips in benchmarks I've ran run close to the 7000 and 8000 non x3d series Ryzens. Its impressive how fast it runs games at such a high framerate on an RX 7600. Easy install, no issues getting to boot and post. Definitely good at helping eliminate stuttering at 1% and .1% (update: my computer still runs great. Recently tried out Sons of the Forest on my Ryzen 7 5700x3d+XFX Radeon Speedster Qick 308 7600+48 gigs Corsair DDR4 3200 on my MSI B450 Gaming Plus Max, can confirm it plays well at 4 and 5k resolutions with FSR3 on) This is probably the fastest computer I've ever built. Thanks to all of you wonderful engineers who made all this! *One year later, still running strong, I have updated the GPU to an RX7700XT, no heat issues, no crashing, stays cool for me with the wraith prism cooler I had with the 3700x, still blazing fast, still keeping up relatively well even against newer generation CPUs, probably the best overall value and performance CPU for AM4, stable, reliable, FAST*

Cons: Its not unlocked, but that's not too bad though considering the performance you get in return for it. I mean this chip is outperforming some of AMD's newer generation stuff in certain games. Blows my mind, I don't understand how this CPU can keep up with processors 2 generations ahead of its socket. But that's not a con, that's a good thing. (update: still no issues with heat nor with voltages, everything working well.) *update 2, 1 year later* About the only "mod" you can do is undervolting which may help extend the lifespan of this chip, curve optimizer/kombostrike, most everyone seems to be recommending -30, and that's what seems to be the most stable for me. Like I said no heat issues, no "cons" to really speak of here. Great value for the performance you get. Still holding on strong, still performing extremely well*

Overall Review: I would recommend this CPU to anyone wanting to upgrade their AM4. Its definitely a good CPU. It survived quite a bit of getting knocked around in delivery (the box came damaged and it scared me) but it booted and posted just fine. Ran several benchmarks all night and no issue. I see huge FPS gains across the board upgrading from a 3700x. At least a good 20-30 frames in many games. Its impressive how smooth it is. Makes doing 4k stuff even more enjoyable (and not a stuttering mess) How it does this on a lower clock speed than my previous chip is amazing to me. Low heat for me too, I don't see the chip going higher than 55C under load. Overall, a good CPU, would recommend for those who want to put it in and just get to gaming. This CPU is not meant for tweaking or overclocking at all. It already does an excellent job at keeping up with the next gen processors, so it is a moot point. Just install it and play! *update 1 year later* After upgrading my GPU from the rx7600 to the rx7700xt, I feel like this computer is an absolute performance beast. No need to overclock, no need to tweak settings. This thing runs incredibly, it runs stable, doesn't crash, doesn't have heat issues, It works well for everything I throw at it. Gaming, AI (especially with ROCm on my rx7700xt), everything works, and beyond what I even expected. There's a reason this CPU is being celebrated. It is one of the best CPUs I've ever had. I definitely got more than my money's worth with this chip. I didn't expect this thing to be this stable for this long since the tech was relatively new when I got it. But its STILL going strong, so I'd definitely recommend this chip to people. I know folks are talking like ddr4 manufacturing is on its way out, etc, and they're trying to incrementally get people to upgrade to AM5. But for me, this thing is stable, rock solid. Good for gaming and production, good for music production, good for video editing, good for art, good for generative AI. Might not have a fancy NPU in it, but if you pair it with a card that has AI accelerators, you'll be fine. It has AVX2 so you'll be set for stuff that needs matrix calculations and such. Excellent product. Wish I could give it more than 5 eggs. Thanks again AMD and all the engineers, and thanks Newegg for the great deal. You guys rock.

Pros: Updated review: this card is really good. Ever since AMD put out their fluid motion frame generation tech and FSR this card has really shined. I'm seeing huge framerate increases in games. My current system is a Ryzen 7 5700x3d on an MSI b450 motherboard with this RX 7600 graphics card. I'm thoroughly impressed. As graphics drivers have been getting updated, the framerates have been going up. From December til now I've seen huge increases in performance. This card is really worth it for the price/performance ratio. It can deliver really good performance at higher resolutions too on many games. Sons of the Forest performs outstanding, even at true 4k resolution it still performs really well. This card pairs well with x3d chips. To give you an idea of what i've upgraded from the 3700x paired with rx570s in crossfire... i was getting maybe 30 to 40 frames less under that setup. This card is mean, its pretty stout being able to be double the power of polaris cards like that. 6 nm too. Plus its got AI accelerators on it for if you want to run LM studio locally on your PC. This is a great card.

Cons: They have released a 16 gig version of this card if you would rather get that version but for budget gamers this card is really good still.

Overall Review: I would recommend this card to people who want to experience what above 100+ frames per second feels like without having to bust their budget to get to that.

Pros: 4.4 gigaherz no problem, with an m.2 drive expect to load into os in under 10 seconds. Runs pretty much every modern game no problem. CPU cooler handles the job, RGB is a nice touch. Stays decent temps at 4.4 even under load. Decent heat sink with copper pipes. Good air cooler.

Cons: 4.4 is the brick wall here. You might be able to eke out about 20 more megahertz if you win the chip lottery but don't expect to go much higher than that. Even at 4.4 its insanely fast and can handle everything modern. Overclocking on these zen2 platforms is more about how fast you can get your ram to go for some reason, XMP profiles and all that. But other than that it runs well

Overall Review: Its capable of a lot of things, multitasking, video editing, graphic design and cad art, music production, playing modern games at 2k and 4k resolution (although a lot of that will play on how well your graphics card is) but even the cpu can help make up to some degree in several games if you're upgrading from an older system and have 570s or 580s for example and are holding out for the next rdna release before you update your graphics card, this cpu works well with those cards and will probably work very well with the new navis getting ready to come out, but if you're holding out on graphics card upgrade I'd say stick to 1080p or 1440p for now until you can get a card that can handle 4k without slowdown. I'd say this processor is impressive. It exceeded my expectations, I thought it was going to be a slight incremental improvement over the 2700, but its really a lot faster than the 2700, I suppose the die shrink makes all the difference, 7 nm. Its impressive, worth a try if you're looking for an affordable yet powerful upgrade. If you get this though I do recommend very good DDR4, 3200 or better, and at the very least rx 570s and a decent b450 if you are looking to build this on a budget, but i would wait on graphics card major upgrades until the next rdna release of navi by AMD. OR you could wait until the AMD 4700 APUs are more widely available, which the 4700 will basically be the 3700x with a graphics processor in it and less l3 cache to make room for the gpu

Pros: This CPU replaced an 8120. I didn't think there would be that drastic of an improvement, but there is. About 15 percent improvement as far as I can tell, but games do work much better. This CPU also tends to overclock a little better (at least a little more stable) than the 8120. Highest I could get to with a decent double-fan heatsink Coolermaster setup is about 4.6, however it is unstable and gets very hot at this point. I bumped it back and see it performs pretty well at 4.4 to 4.5 however it still gets hot under certain settings - I recommend you leave the safety settings on so it can vdroop when it isn't active and so it can underclock some cores when it isn't active to keep it cool.

Cons: It gets extremely hot beyond 4.5 gigahertz. I have one of those Coolermaster double-fanned heatsinks with lots of heatpipes. It is still very good for the price, considering how much you can get out of it.

Overall Review: If you want to go much higher than that with an AMD CPU, then the 9590 is your best bet. However this chip is very cost friendly and the price-performance ratio is nice. If you want an 83** series and want one that has a better TDP then go for the 8370. If you're upgrading from an 8120 or 8150 it is worth it, especially with prices dropping so low on these. These can hold you over until Zen.