Over at Best Buy, you can nab an Intel 9th generation Core i5-9400 processor for just $129.99. We don't recall ever seeing it go for this low—elsewhere, you're looking at spending around $190 and up on this chip, making this an excellent Cyber Monday CPU deal.
The i5-9400 is essentially the same as the i5-9400F, one of the best CPUs for gaming if you're on a budget, except the i5-9400 offers integrated graphics. Even if you're using a discrete GPU—and you should be, for a gaming PC—having integrated graphics slots this just above the 9400F in terms of value. It's also nice to have a integrated graphics as a backup, in case your discrete GPU gives up the ghost, and you can use Intel's Quick Sync video hardware to help offload video encoding and decoding.
The i5-9400 is a 6-core CPU with six threads, meaning it does not support Hyper-Threading. That's not a huge deal for gaming, though, because this chip is still a fast part with half a dozen cores clocked at 2.9GHz (base) to 4.1GHz (boost). It typically runs at 3.9GHz on all cores, however.
In our testing, the i5-9400F (and by extension, the i5-9400 that's on sale here) is basically tied with AMD's Ryzen 9 3900X in gaming performance. At some point, games may become too taxing for a 6-core chip, but that day is not today. As it stands, the i5-9400 is plenty fast and now more affordable than ever.
