Intel's 11th generation Core desktop processors (Rocket Lake) will hit store shelves soon (next week), but one can make a strong case for building a PC around the previous generation of CPUs. That is cost-effectiveness. Right now, for example, you can get a Core i9 10900 for just $359.99 at Newegg.

This is the price after applying promo code 93XQP47 at checkout. This same CPU has typically sold for around $400 in recent weeks and as much as $460 in January; after the launch of AMD's Ryzen 5000 series (Zen 3) and ahead of the upcoming Socket Lake, prices have dropped dramatically.

This is great news if you are looking to maximize your budget. Intel's previous generation CPU, also known as Comet Lake, may not be the newest silicon on the block, but it still has robust performance. [The Core i9 10900 is the flagship SKU, minus the unlocked multiplier of the Core i9 10900K, and is one of the best CPUs for gaming. There is no need to overclock this class of chips and it can turbo up to 5.2GHz right out of the box. So it is fast for single-threaded workloads and provides enough cores and threads for multi-threaded computing.

One reason to wait for Rocket Lake is the introduction of PCI Express 4.0 support, which allows PCIe 4.0 SSDs to run at full speed. There is no problem with this direction (or building around Ryzen 5000 series CPUs). Just be prepared to pay significantly more; we are not attracted to the pricing of Rocket Lake, especially considering that the highest priced SKU is an 8-core/16-thread configuration.