Intel's Special Edition Core i9-12900KS plummets to all-time low $240

TheCore i9-12900KSis Intel's fastest Alder Lake CPU out of the 12th Generation family. It has a record-high 5.5 GHz boost clock (for Alder Lake), a 300 MHz improvement over the more mainstreamCore i9-12900K. The CPU has eight Golden Cove P-cores, eight Gracemount E-cores, and a 150W TDP.

For its time, the Core i9-12900KS was the fastest gaming CPU, significantly outperforming all of Intel's previous generation parts and AMD's Ryzen 5000 series chips.

The Core i9-12900KS falls short against newer chips, but it's still a capable gaming CPU. At $239, it is the most significant discount we've ever seen on a special edition Intel CPU. One of the benefits of the Core i9-12900KS is Alder Lake's reliability. It is the only other LGA1700 CPU lineup unscathed by theinstability issuesthat plagued Raptor Lake and Raptor Lake Refresh chips, which were eventually resolved.

The Core i9-12900KS faces explicitly heavy competition from theRyzen 7 5700X3D,which is significantly faster in gaming and cheaper, being just $209 onAmazonat the time of writing. Intel's newer 13th Gen CPUs are also a better deal, with even Intel's mid-rangeCore i5-13600Kbeing noticeably faster than the 12900KS in gaming, thanks to Raptor Lake's bigger L2 cache. The 13600K is priced significantly lower than the Core i9 part at just around $180 at the time of writing.

Regardless, if you're in the market exclusively for a 12th Gen CPU, nothing comes close to Intel's latest Core i9-12900KS deal. It is an excellent deal on the fastest Alder Lake CPU you can buy today, with the highest clock speeds of any Alder Lake chip and the most processing cores of any consumer 12th Gen part.