Honestly, the difference these days between CPU models in performance for single-threaded stuff, which is the bottleneck for most everything aside from some games that will use all threads, just isn’t all that high.

I tend to get high end CPUs these days because the CPU market isn’t advancing all that quickly in performance these days either, so you’re not buying something that you need to replace in short order. But you gotta consider what the tradeoff is.

The highest end CPU there is the 9950X3D. The lowest end CPU is the 9900X.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/6549vs6171/AMD-Ryzen-9-9950X3D-vs-AMD-Ryzen-9-9900X

You say that the 9900X costs 25% less.

In the above benchmark, it performs 1.1% worse in single-threaded performance, and 22.2% worse in a multithreaded performance — this is a synthetic test that ties up all cores.

If you’re, say, web-browsing or doing the great majority of tasks, you’re probably going to be a lot closer to being bound by the single-threaded difference – you aren’t likely to be saturating all cores.

Even most games won’t tie up all cores.

If you’re doing video editing, that might.

But the difference just isn’t all that large for most things. Unless you intend to be doing a great deal of the few things that’ll actually tie up all your cores, the CPUs will probably perform about the same. If the cost difference is important to you, probably won’t much hurt to go with the less expensive CPU.

Well, with that kind of CPU, I’d reccomend 32GB of RAM, as 16 feels a little weak for such a chip.

If you’re earning money from the aforementioned editing, you can justify the absolute best CPU money can buy, though a 10% cheaper 9950X will match it. When it comes to gaming, it’s so far beyond any imaginable performance requirement, you legitimately might never need to buy another CPU again, and in this it is matched by the 17% cheaper 9800X3D.

If I were you, and assuming you make money from editing, I’d save the couple hundred bucks and get the 9950X (non3D) because there are very, VERY, limited real-world scenarios in which the 3D variant will outperform the non3D (gaming or otherwise)

I’m very, very happy with the 9800X3D, so you can save yourself a bit of cash there to put towards the GPU. With a fast modern CPU like that, you might even consider an Intel B580 to relieve that GPU bottleneck.