In the face of growing competition from AMD, Intel has been dropping prices on a few of its processors over the past few months. The Core i7-8700K and i5-9400F both went on sale recently, and now you can get the overclockable i5-9600K for $229.99 from multiple retailers—$33 off the usual price. Newegg even has an additional $15 discount going on right now.
This specific CPU has six cores/six threads (no Hyper-Threading), a base frequency of 3.7GHz, a max turbo frequency of 4.6GHz, and a TDP of 95W. It supports up to 128GB of RAM, and ships with Intel UHD Graphics 630 built-in.
We don't know yet how AMD's third-generation Ryzen processors will stack up against the 9600K, but it's comparable in many ways to the Ryzen 7 2700X—the i5 generally performs better in games, but it's worse in multi-threaded workloads (like heavy simulation games or video editing/streaming) than the 2700X. They're similarly priced once you factor in the price of a CPU cooler with the i5, as Intel's K-series chips don't come with heatsinks or fans in the box.
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