With Intel facing much tougher competition from AMD these days than in years past, it is not surprising that many of the best deals on CPUs on Cyber Monday are discounts on almost all (though not all) Intel chips. Competition will do that. One of the best deals right now is Intel's Core i9 10850K processor, a 10-core/20-thread Comet Lake CPU.

It is marked down to $399.99 on Amazon (a $139.95 savings) and could easily serve as the foundation for a high-end gaming PC. With all cores and threads at its disposal, the 10850K is a multi-threaded chip that is ready for content creation and professional work. It also runs fast up to 5.2 GHz (max turbo clock) without manual overclocking.

So basically, it is armed with a bunch of cores and threads, which does not diminish its ability to accelerate to higher clocks when needed. Put another way, it's a more affordable version of the Core i9 10900K, one of the best CPUs for gaming, with the only difference being a 100MHz drop in base clock and boost clock. Not much if you are already above 5 GHz.

If you have a lot of money to throw at a CPU, the hard decision is whether to build an Intel rig around the 10850K in this Cyber Monday sale or get the AMD Ryzen 7 3800XT for $359 on Amazon (a $40 savings). 3800XT is previous generation CPU (Zen 2) with fewer cores and threads (8C16T), but building around it gives you a drop-in upgrade path to a Ryzen 5000 series CPU. And it's $40 cheaper.

Ryzen 5000 CPUs are hard to get now, but will settle down next year; build around AMD and possibly upgrade once next year (AMD's socket AM4 will end with Zen 3) or use more cores and threads in an Intel setup, use them until they are ready to overhaul the platform. Either way, you'll have a screaming fast gaming PC from the get-go.