If you're on the hunt for a powerful chip with plenty of horsepower for threaded workloads, AMD's got you covered this holiday season. You can score the 16-core 32-thread Threadripper 1950X for a mere $450, marking the lowest price we've seen for the chip. You get free shipping, too. This powerful chip exposes 60 PCIe lanes to the user and features 3.4/4.0 GHz base/boost frequencies. Both Amazon and Newegg are running the sale for the next five days.

If ponying up for a high-end X399 platform and enough RAM to populate the quad-channel board is a bit too much, you can step down to the Ryzen 7 1700X. You can find this chip for a fantastic $149 at Newegg, but Amazon has yet to price match. This nimble 8-core 16-thread chip drops into AM4 motherboards, which are inexpensive and plentiful. AMD also plans to support the AM4 socket until 2020, so you'll have a solid upgrade path in the future.

If there's a Microcenter nearby, you can also pick up the Ryzen 7 1700X for $130. This applies to in-store purchases only.

Both chips are previous-gen models, but the supporting chipsets are both compatible with the current-gen Ryzen processors. You'll need a cooler for both processors, so make sure to budget that into your build, and X399 motherboards can be pricey.