Intel's Core i9 12900K for $356 is an older CPU actually worth buying
Intel Core i9 12900K | 8+8 core | 24 threads | 5.2GHz Boost clock (P-core) | $589$356 at Amazon (save $233)(opens in new tab)For a whole lot less than it launched for, you can pick up Alder Lake's flagship chip. This is a multithreading machine of a processor and a superb gaming CPU, you just need a decent 500/600-series motherboard and some RAM to go with it, and you'll be cooking up a high-end gaming PC for less.
When the new shiny thing comes out, it tends to blow the older generation stuff out of the water. For its 13th Gen, Intel increased core counts across the board and heaped more cache on its chips. Yet it wasn't a crushing defeat for the older 12th Gen chips. They can still be worth it, for the right price, and at $356 it's tough to turn down this Intel Core i9 12900K deal.
Right now you can grab the Intel Core i9 12900K for $356 on Amazon(opens in new tab). A massive saving on the chip's lowest recommended customer price of $589.
The Core i9 12900K is a 24-thread processor, which makes it a pretty mean multithreaded chip for content creation and streaming. It was the dominant chip in its day, and 2021 wasn't really all that long ago. Of course, we loved it for its mostly unrivalled gaming performance. In my Intel Core i9 12900K review(opens in new tab), I said «this chip totally obliterates previous Intel generations by most metrics: single-threaded performance, multithreaded performance, clock speed, and memory performance.»
It quickly dispatched most of AMD's Ryzen 5000-series at the time of its release, too. Nowadays AMD has even better gaming chips in the Ryzen 7000-series with 3D V-Cache, and Intel has Raptor Lake, but you won't find half as good a discount on those chips as you can this Core i9 right
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