TL;DR: Intel's Core i9-12900KS, the Special Edition Alder Lake CPU, is on sale for $239, a huge drop from its original $739 price. This limited-time deal is available on Amazon as an early Black Friday offer.
Intel's Core i9-12900KS, the Special Edition version of its flagship from the Alder Lake generation - the first family of hybrid CPUs (with efficiency cores) - is now at a surprisingly low price on sale.
Is the Core i9-12900KS a good gaming CPU? It offers plenty of grunt, for sure, particularly at this price level (Image Credit: Amazon / Intel)
The Core i9-12900KS, Intel's supercharged take on the past-gen flagship, can be had for $239, as spotted by Tom's Hardware - and that's as low as we can ever recall a 'KS' model going for.
Amazon has marked this as a limited-time deal, an early Black Friday CPU surprise, if you will - so it may not hang around. If you want to grab the 12900KS and own a chip that cost $739 when the CPU first launched, you might want to pull the trigger fairly swiftly. Scroll down to get the deal from Amazon in the box at the bottom of this story (where you can also check out the Newegg price to boot).
The bonus here is that the 12th-generation of Intel silicon fortunately predates all the wonkiness around voltage-related instability, as that only started with 13th-gen chips (Raptor Lake).
With the Core i9-12900KS, you get a boost speed of 5.5GHz, which was highly impressive at the time, but since Raptor Lake Refresh hit 6GHz (out of the box) with its KS edition, it doesn't seem such a lofty height. (Albeit there was a price to pay with Raptor Lake Refresh, of course, with those instability woes - and Raptor Lake too, as noted, issues which Intel has since cured, but will likely stick in the mind of consumers).
As a point of interest, what can you get for the $240 mark with Intel's new Arrow Lake processor range? Well, nothing in fact, because currently the lowest-tier Intel Core Ultra 5 245K has a recommended price of $309, and it's slightly higher than that right now ($319 at Newegg for example).
At current pricing, then, the Core i9-12900KS is actually 25% cheaper than the Core Ultra 5 245K, which is something worth thinking about. Especially as most folks don't get the chance to own a limited edition processor from Intel, due to how pricey they are at launch.
Furthermore, also consider that upgraders will need a new motherboard with the Core Ultra chip, but may not with the Alder Lake flagship (if they have an LGA 1700 board, that is).
Alder Lake was the first range of Intel chips to move to the LGA 1700 socket, which was abandoned with the new Arrow Lake CPUs after playing host to three generations of silicon.
It is true, however, that gamers in particular would do well to consider other options, including AMD CPUs of course. As Tom's points out, the Ryzen 7 5700X3D is a great gaming chip and is a little cheaper at $206 on Amazon at the time of writing. You don't get a gold wafer with it, mind, or the heavyweight productivity clout of the Alder Lake CPU...