Anyone looking for an affordable gaming CPU, but refuses to use AMD, will want to check out Amazon today. Intel’s Core i5-9600K is $219, the all-time low for this CPU and a drop of $20 from its more recent price of $240.
The Core i5-9600K features six cores and a base frequency of 3.7GHz with a turbo boost up to 4.6GHz. It can also be overclocked if you invest in a Z-series motherboard. But the one thing this processor doesn’t support is HyperThreading. That means its 6 cores can’t spawn 12 threads, unlike AMD’s rival Ryzen 5 processors.
That’s not necessarily a downside if you’re not performing core-heavy processing tasks like video editing. Many people argue that current games don’t really take advantage of anything beyond four cores, making these six- or eight-core CPUs less important. Game makers also tend to favor single-thread performance over more cores, and Intel excels at fast single-thread performance compared to AMD.
The bottom line is that if you’re playing GPU-bound games performance is not a concern. With CPU-bound games such as Civilization VI or Far Cry 5 there will be a difference compared to more robust Intel CPUs, but overall the Core i5-9600K’s single-thread performance should provide a great gaming experience.
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Author: Ian Paul, Contributor
Ian is an independent writer based in Israel who has never met a tech subject he didn't like. He primarily covers Windows, PC and gaming hardware, video and music streaming services, social networks, and browsers. When he's not covering the news he's working on how-to tips for PC users, or tuning his eGPU setup.