What just happened? Now that Intel's Raptor Lake processors are here and selling well, we're seeing discounts on the company's previous generation of CPUs, including the excellent Intel Core i9-12900K/KF. The Alder Lake flagship arrived last November with a $650 MSRP. Now, it's available for close to $400.
Amazon is selling the Intel Core i9-12900K for $416.99, which the site lists as a 41% discount over the usual price. They're likely selling out fast, so you could always forgo the integrated graphics and opt for the Intel Core i9-12900KF, currently available for $414.97.
Both deals are also available as bundle packs for those who need a motherboard. The Core i9-12900K with an MSI MEG Z690 Unify-X Gaming is $876.98, while the Core i9-12900KF with an MSI MEG Z690 Unify Gaming is $834. Both motherboards support DDR5 memory.
We love the Core i9-12900K, awarding it a score of 90 in our review. It packs 8 performance cores along with 8 efficient cores for a total of 24 threads. The P-Cores clock up to 5.2 GHz, with the E-Cores limited to 3.9 GHz. There's 30 MB of L3 cache, a total of 14MB of L2 cache, 16 PCIe 5.0 lanes from the CPU, and four PCIe 4.0 lanes. The chip has a default TDP of 125W.
Both CPUs are popular among Amazon customers, too. The Core i9-12900K has a score of 4.8 out of 5 from almost 1,000 reviews, while the i9-12900KF has a score of 4.7 from 349 reviews.
Interestingly, while we've not seen any significant discounts for the latest 13th-gen Raptor Lake CPUs, some of AMD's rival 7000 chips are already cheaper than they were at launch. The 12-Core, 24-Thread Ryzen 9 7900X, which arrived with a $549 MSRP, is available for $449, and the Ryzen 7950X dropped to $554 a few weeks ago. There have been reports of weak sales among Zen 4 processors, but team red did claw a large amount of user share back from Intel in last month's Steam survey.