Intel’s been busy lately, releasing the long-awaited Comet Lake range of desktop processors. This lineup has thrown some curveballs into the mix, too, with the Intel Core i3 10300 offering a new budget gaming option. At the top end, the Core i9 10900K has now replaced the Core i9 9900K as the best gaming CPU when considering raw gaming performance in a vacuum. But the 9900K still has a great deal to offer, and this ousting means that it now has a significant price cut on Amazon.
You can now pick up the Intel Core i9 9900K for $449.99 or £429.99 on Amazon US and Amazon UK respectively, with the former offering a $114 (20%) discount and the latter offering a £95 (18%) discount on their retail prices.
And let’s get one thing straight from the start: the 9900K is still one of the single best CPUs for gaming that your money can buy – Intel just happens to have recently released something even quicker (and good luck getting your hands on a 10900K, at the moment, because if you manage to find it listed on a retailer site at all it’s probably out of stock).
For this discounted price you’re getting an eight-core, 16-thread CPU that reaches up to 5GHz on the boost clock. But the raw specs don’t tell the whole story. The fact is that this CPU sits at the peak of gaming performance, beating even the 12-core AMD Ryzen 9 3900X‘s frame rates in most games.
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This is all thanks to its stellar single-threaded performance and the number of iterative optimisations that have gone into the ageing Skylake architecture which the 9900K is based on. It has to guzzle a lot of power and churn out a lot of heat to achieve these results, but if you want something capable of demolishing any game, it’s all for the greater good. With over $100 / £95 off its retail price, gaming enthusiasts can now have a field day with the 9900K. Pair this CPU with one of the best graphics cards, and you have a machine that will be able to play any modern game without even a hint of struggle.