This discount drops the 9700F down $91.26 (23%) from the original $391.25 retail price, making it a great high-end gaming option for those of you who (a) have a discrete graphics card, and (b) aren’t comfortable overclocking. We mention these caveats because the 9700F is a CPU that lacks integrated graphics and is locked, unlike the K-variants.
But for those of you who want a great ‘out of the box’ gaming CPU for a fantastic price, the 9700F is a superb choice at this price. With this processor, you’re getting an eight-core CPU with a base clock of 3GHz and a boost clock of up to 4.7GHz.
Intel maintains its lead over AMD when it comes to raw, single-threaded gaming performance. And with eight cores on the 9700F you don’t have much to worry about when it comes to multi-core applications, either – although, if you’re wanting a high-end CPU for productivity tasks like encoding you might want to go with something like the AMD Ryzen 7 3700X or 3900X instead since the 9700F lacks Intel’s Hyper-Threading technology.
Where this CPU comes into its own though is for those of you that want something that’s now reasonably cheap for a high-end CPU, but that can demolish games at stock settings and fare extremely well in most general-purpose multi-core tasks.
In fact, the 9700F/9700K comes close to the 9900K – our previous pick for the fastest gaming CPU – when it comes to frame rates in games, only falling short when you consider competing Ryzen CPUs’ hyperthreading and multi-core performance. If you don’t need integrated graphics or overclocking potential, the 9700F at this price is a steal for gaming.