If you have been paying attention to the PC market, you’ll know that Intel’s 11th Gen lineup, most notably the Core i7-11700K are now selling for lower than their MSRP, just a week after they were officially launched. The 11700K is going for $404.99 on Newegg, nearly $50 less than the competing AMD Ryzen 7 5800X which makes sense considering that the latter is faster in just about everything. However, the Rocket Lake offerings do pretty well in gaming workloads, more or less leveling with the Ryzen competition.
However, in South Asian countries like India, the situation is the opposite. The Core i7-11700K is priced a fair bit more than the Ryzen 7 5800X despite the fact that the latter is faster. Now, why might that be? Well, you know, taxes, customs duties or some other rubbish. That’s what most retailers will tell you:
As you can see, the Core i7-11700K (at 43,245 INR) is roughly 4 grand more than the Ryzen 7 5800X. I made some inquiries and it turns out that the former can be had for slightly lower prices at offline stores but still not cheaper than the 5800X.
We’d like Intel India to look into this and keep the prices of the newly launched CPUs in check. In case you’re wondering, the Core i9-11900K is completely absent from the South Asian market while the Core i5-11600K is priced the same as the Ryzen 5 5600X (at 28K), again despite being slower overall. In the US market, the 11600K is $40 cheaper than the 5600X.
