Earlier this week, Intel launched what it’s marketing has called “the best gaming CPU ever” in the i9-9900K. This $580 part (if you can find it) has 8 cores and 16 threads clocked at 3.6GHz. When the chip clicks over into turbo, two of the cores will race all the way up to 5GHz. It’s a fast chip. For gaming, it has it where it counts. And it’s an excellent workhorse in productivity apps as well.
As a piece of technology, it’s impressive. It is satisfying to throw this onto a motherboard rocking Intel’s new Z390 chipset (although it will work on most Z370 boards) and immediately crank out massive scores in benchmarking tools. But the inevitable and most crucial question is “should you buy this?” And that conversation always depends on why you want it.
GamesBeat