I'm sure by now you all know that Intel's Comet Lake CPUs are upon us. But Intel's 9th Gen CPUs are still knocking around, and just because the newer generation is out doesn't mean the previous generation is any less spectacular – but it does mean that 9th Gen CPUs are currently receiving promotional price drops.
The Intel Core i7 9700K is no exception, and this CPU is currently on sale for 17% ($70) off at $339.99 on Amazon US, and 15% (£50) off at £279.99 on Amazon UK – the lowest price it's reached over the past few months according to the CamelCamelCamel tracker, and matching its lowest ever price from January.
The Core i7 9700K is an eight-core, eight-thread CPU with a base clock of 3.6GHz and a turbo clock of 4.9GHz. It matches the current-gen Core i5 10600K when it comes to gaming performance – a processor that we think is one of the best options on the market right now, closely contending with the AMD Ryzen 5 3600.
Boasting eight cores (unfortunately without Hyper-Threading enabled) this CPU has more than enough juice to brute-force its way through any multi-core-heavy task, and its single-threaded performance is stellar, too. In short, even if you’re using an Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti this CPU shouldn’t bottleneck you in games – you should still be GPU- rather than CPU-bound.
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It even gets close to the Intel Core i9 9900K in our benchmarks. The only downside is its lack of Hyper-Threading, but if you’re in it for the gamez and framez this shouldn’t affect your performance much, if at all, considering it boasts eight physical cores. If you’re looking for a new CPU, and if you already have a compatible motherboard or can pick one up on the cheap, the 9700K is a steal at this price.