For PC gamers and budget-constrained creative types, Intel's "Alder Lake" Core i5-12600K punches well above its weight in gaming and content creation alike. Just know that the cost of adoption (memory, motherboard, cooler) may make waiting a bit to upgrade a better bet.
The Core i9-12900K is Intel's first truly innovative high-end desktop CPU in years, showing great potential in its performance/efficiency mixed-core design and support for DDR5 memory. Just expect a high initial cost of adoption and, perhaps, some PC-gaming growing pains.
All Specs
The Intel Core i7-11700K ($399 MSRP) is the eight-core, 16-thread desktop CPU that the Core i9-11900K should have been. The AMD Ryzen 7 5800X mostly beats it in flat-out performance, but the Core i7-11700K s reasonably competitive pricing (especially if you can find it at a discount) keeps the contest from being a runaway. Clear of many of the BIOS problems we ran into while testing the Core i9-11900K at launch, the Core i7-11700K shows that with a bit of platform maturity and some more aggressive pricing, Intel s not out of the desktop processor race just yet.