If you were around during the last Prime Day in July and picking parts for your PC, you may be a bit confused why there’s another one now in October. Well, Amazon has created a second sales event that they dub the Prime Early Access Sale, but which is essentially just a second set of Prime Day deals of the year. That’s great news because if you’ve already built your PC from scratch, it’s a shot at getting some upgrades, and if this is your first Prime Day that you’re buying parts for, you can make a high-end build with a huge discount on the Intel Core i9-11900k, which is going for just $362 on Amazon right now, a significant 44% discount.
Why you should buy the Intel Core i9 CPU
If you aren’t familiar with Intel’s i9 lineup, the Intel Core i9-11900K is one of their top-end processors that uses Rocket Lake architecture on a 14nm wafer, compared to the 10nm wafer of some of their other high-end chips. What that ultimately means is that you get eight cores and 16 threads to work with, although it does much better in single-core processing than multi-core. When comparing the Intel Core i9-11900K and AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, the Ryzen 9 comes a little ahead in multi-threading and multi-core processing, which is great for things like audio editing but doesn’t beat Intel when it comes to gaming. As such, if you’re primarily a gamer, the i9-11900K will do an excellent job of keeping up with the toughest of games.
As for clock speeds, it can go to an impressive 5.3GHz on a single core, which truthfully isn’t surprising since Intel’s Rocket Lake chips have been successfully overclocked to 7GHz and therefore have always had strong clock speed performance. Of course, that does come at the cost of heat, and the i9-11900K can certainly get hot, which is why it’s important to get as good a cooler as you can get, preferably an AiO cooler that has a two- or three-fan radiator, because you’re going to need that cooling performance. This also means that overclocking will be exceedingly difficult, and if this is your first watercooling and overclocking build, it may be a little bit risky, especially since Intel no longer provides overclocking warranty.
While not necessarily something that will play a big part in your purchasing decision, the Intel Core i9-11900K also has onboard Intel Xe Graphics, targeted at laptop users, and while not necessarily letting you play the latest AAA games, you can get away with a bit of casual and light gameplay. We mention it because that’s one of the reasons this i9 comes with eight cores rather than the 10 we’d expect, as some space was made for the Xe Graphics cores.
Overall, the Intel Core i9-11900K is a great little CPU if you’re focused on gaming performance and have the experience and knowledge to do proper overclocking. Otherwise, we’d encourage you to check out the Intel Core i9-12900K instead; it’s newer and more powerful, as well as very strong competition for the best AMD CPUs.
On the other hand, you can also take a look at the best processors for 2022 and see if something piques your interest and your budget more. Alternatively, you can check out the Prime Day PC deals for pre-builts that will save you the hassle of building, especially if you’re anxious about doing it on your own.
Editors’ Recommendations
