I've been using Intel's best Arrow Lake CPU in my main rig for almost a year and I have only one regret: I wish I had bought it at this Prime Day deal price

(Image credit: Intel)

This deal isn't going to be for everyone. If you just use your PC for gaming, then the Ryzen 5 9600X is a better option if you're looking to save money (it's currently $193 at Amazon), and the Ryzen 7 9800X3D will blow it out of the water, though it's quite a lot more expensive ($477 at Amazon).

Intel's LGA 1851 socket will probably only support one more generation of CPUs before reaching the end of life, so if you like to regularly update your processor in the same motherboard, then once again, AMD is the way to go.

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However, if you're like me and you use your rig for lots of different things, including content creation and coding, and you swap out everything inside when it's time to do an upgrade, then I strongly suggest you consider Intel's Core Ultra 7 265K, now just $260 at Amazon.

Where the Core Ultra 7 285K is massively overpriced and the Core Ultra 5 245K is surprisingly underwhelming (especially when previous Core i5s are so good), the 265K stands out in the Arrow Lake crowd for being seriously good value. It has eight P-cores and 12 E-cores (just four fewer than the 285K), giving it 20 threads worth of processing power.

Intel presentation slide for its Core Ultra 200S processors — (Image credit: Intel)

Those little E-cores are far more potent than you'd expect them to be, and Intel's old bugbear of monstrous power consumption in gaming is a thing of the past, as the 265K doesn't use any more energy than an equivalent Ryzen. Sure, once you fully load up the chip across every thread, it'll jump up to 250 W in most motherboards, but thanks to its large heatspreader, it won't boil itself to bits.

Stick the 265K in a nice motherboard like the MSI Z890 Gaming Plus WiFi ($180 at Amazon) and slap in 32 GB of DDR5-6000 CL28 ($98 at Amazon), and you'll have a very capable system for under $540. That's still a fair chunk of money, of course, and you can spend a lot less than this on an AM5 Ryzen 5 gaming setup.

However, it won't be anywhere near as capable as the Core Ultra 7 265K, so if flexibility and outright processing power are important to you, then I heartily recommend it. I should know, as I've been using a 265K in my main rig for gaming, photo and video editing, and Unreal Engine work for nearly a year. Other than its gaming chops, I don't have a single complaint.

That's the beauty of products that aren't as good as the competition: they drop in price very quickly, turning them into a proper bargain.

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3. Corsair TC100 Relaxed | Gaming chair | $160 (save $110)

4. MSI MAG | 32" 4K OLED | $750 (save $150)

5. ASRock RX 9070 XT | 16 GB GPU | $640

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Nick, gaming, and computers all first met in the early 1980s. After leaving university, he became a physics and IT teacher and started writing about tech in the late 1990s. That resulted in him working with MadOnion to write the help files for 3DMark and PCMark. After a short stint working at Beyond3D.com, Nick joined Futuremark (MadOnion rebranded) full-time, as editor-in-chief for its PC gaming section, YouGamers. After the site shutdown, he became an engineering and computing lecturer for many years, but missed the writing bug. Cue four years at TechSpot.com covering everything and anything to do with tech and PCs. He freely admits to being far too obsessed with GPUs and open-world grindy RPGs, but who isn't these days?

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