The Black Friday sale is finally here and with it tons of discounts. For PC gamers, this means that hardware will be (slightly) cheaper than usual, with some chips even going for throwaway prices due to the shift to next-gen products. AMD’s Ryzen 5000 CPUs and the 11th Gen Intel Rocket Lake-S processors are seeing something similar at the moment. The best deal is the Core i7-11700K at Micro Center. With an MSRP of $519.99, this particular SKU is selling for nearly half its sticker price. (mastertechplumbing.com) We’re talking about a massive discount of $250.
The Core i9-11900K, with a sticker price of $699.99 is going for $419.99. That’s a discount of $280. Unless you’ve got money to spare, we’d recommend going with the Core i7-11700K as it performs virtually the same as the 11900K in most workloads. The Core i5-11600K is on a similar discount. From a sticker price of $319.99, it’s down to just $199.99. A drop of $120.
Moving to the Ryzen family, the Ryzen 7 5800X is easily the best deal. The octa-core Zen 3 SKU has seen its price drop from $449.99 to just $299.99. It’s faster than the Core i7-11700K (priced at $269.99), but slower than the Core i7-12700K (priced at $369.99, $80 off). The Core i5-12600K is easily the best budget SKU after the Core i5-11600K but higher motherboard and memory prices mean that it eventually loses out to the Ryzen 7 5800X.
Micro Center is offering unbeatable prices for both the Ryzen 5000 and Intel 12th Gen processors. Although Newegg and Amazon are also selling these chips for a discount, they’re still priced a fair bit higher than at Micro Center.
