Since time immemorial (i.e: 2008), Intel CPUs have largely fallen into three distinct categories: you’ve got your entry-level Core i3s, your mid-range Core i5s, and your high-end Core i7s. With the recent introduction of Intel’s new 9th generation of Coffee Lake CPUs, however, the processor giant has now expanded that range with a new Core i9 series, the first and most powerful of which is the super fast Core i9-9900K. The 9900K is by no means the first Core i9 Intel have ever made, of course. It’s just that previously you only tended to find them in workstations and enterprise PCs. With their astronomical prices and ludicrous number of cores, they’ve always been massive overkill for your average gaming desktop, but Intel’s now hoping to change that with the eight-core 3.6GHz 9900K. Is this the best gaming CPU money can buy? Let’s find out. You’ll still have to fork out a considerable amount of cash for the Core i9-9900K – a whopping $580 in the US and an even more crippling £600 in the UK, making it twice as expensive as AMD’s current top-end consumer CPU, the eight-core 3.7GHz Ryzen 7 2700X. Compared to the rest of Intel’s Core i9 line-up, though (which will set you back the better part of a grand), this is by far the cheapest way to get a taste of what a Core i9 has to offer. Not that that’s any kind of excuse. If I had a spare £600 lying around, I’d much rather… [Read full story]
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