When shiny new products are introduced, they tend to blow older generations out of the water. With its 13th generation chips, Intel has increased the overall number of cores and included more cache. However, it has not suffered a major defeat to the previous generation of 12th generation chips. At the right price, it's still worth it, and at $356, it's hard to turn down this Intel Core i9 12900K deal.

You can now buy the Intel Core i9 12900K on Amazon for $356 (opens in new tab). That's a significant savings over the chip's minimum customer recommended price of $589.

The Core i9 12900K is a 24-thread processor, making it a pretty good multithreaded chip for content creation and streaming; the Core i9 12900K was dominant at the time, and not so long ago in 2021. Of course, the unrivaled gaming performance was also a draw: in our review of the Intel Core i9 12900K (opens in a new tab), we said, "The chip completely obliterates the previous Intel generation in most metrics, including single-threaded performance, multithreaded performance, clock speed, and memory performance. completely obliterated."

Most of AMD's Ryzen 5000 series also quickly eradicated them upon release. Now AMD has even better gaming chips in the Ryzen 7000 series with 3D V-Cache, and Intel has Raptor Lake, but you can't buy these chips for half as much as this Core i9 now. the Core i9 13900K is $560 dollars (open in new tab), just below MSRP.

The Core i9 12900K was the flagship of Intel's new approach to CPU design when it came out. Instead of straight gaming cores, it featured eight performance cores (P-cores) and eight efficiency cores (E-cores), with the P-cores handling speedy gaming workloads and the E-cores handling background tasks and distributing less critical loads elsewhere.

An important point here is the price comparison with the Core i7 13700K. This is a very similar chip to the Core i9 12900K, but differs in that it runs a bit faster on both the P and E cores; the Core i7 13700K costs $393 (open in new tab) and may be worth it to some, but the Core i9 12900K is $37 dollars cheaper.

Both are much cheaper than AMD's Ryzen 9 7900X, but the Ryzen 7 7700X may be available for less. In our benchmarks, the Core i9 12900K generally outperformed AMD's Ryzen 7 chips, but Micro Center has some great deals on Ryzen CPU/motherboard/RAM bundles (open in new tab). However, they are in-store pickup only.

Micro Center has a Core i7 13700K bundle with an Asus Prime Z690 motherboard and 32GB of DDR5-6000 RAM for $650 (opens in new tab). Also, the Core i9 12900K and a better motherboard are all for $500 (opens in new tab). However, these are also only available in stores.