One of the best CPUs for gaming, the Intel Core i5-13600KF, has hit a new all-time low just ahead of Black Friday. Over at Amazon, the CPU has fallen to $250, making for a great deal on our favorite mid-range gaming processor and one of the best CPU deals for Black Friday.
One thing to keep in mind is that this chip doesn't have integrated graphics. But for a gaming PC that won't matter much — you'll want a discrete graphics card anyway.
In our testing, we've found that the Core i5-13600KF is effectively equivalent to the newer Core i5-14600KF. So there's no reason to pay more money for the newer chip, especially when this one has fallen so far in price. The 13th Gen chip came within single-digit frame counts against the 14th Gen Core option at both 1080p and 1440p in our review.
The 13th Gen Core i5 includes 6 P-cores at a base clock of 3.5 GHz (up to 5.1 GHz boost) and 8 E-cores (2.6 GHz base and 3.9 GHz boost), for a total of 20 threads. The chip supports 16 lanes of PCIe 5.0 and an extra for PCIe 4.0 lanes.
If you're looking to buy a motherboard to go with the 13600KF, make sure that it has an LGA 1700 socket.
If you're an overclocker, we found that you can push this chip to the same level as the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, and even bring it close to the top-end Core i9-13900K. That's not bad if you're willing to buy a board with an overclockable chipset and play with BIOS settings.
You can read our full review of the Core i5-13600K, where we called it "class-leading performance at its price point," — and that was before this sale.
