We reckon the Intel Core i5-13600K is not only Intel’s best processor overall, but the best CPU for gaming currently available. That quality has also meant it’s maintained its initial price fairly steadily for the last twelve months. But in both the UK and the US, you can get this excellent CPU for a pretty decent discount this Black Friday weekend.

The i5-13600K followed on from Intel’s landmark 12600K, which put the manufacturer back into CPU contention after being caught napping by the excellent AMD Ryzen 5 5600X (which is also currently available at a discount). Boasting six Performance cores and eight less power hungry Efficiency cores for a total of 14, the i5-13600K has a base clock speed of 3.5Ghz for those P-cores and 2.6Ghz for its E-Cores, and gave impressive performance during testing for our review.

In that review, our hardware editor James was initially a little disappointed by the i5-13600k’s iterative improvements over the previous generation, but has since come around to the newer CPU’s strengths. “As such I’m promoting it from ‘fast but just get the old one’ to ‘literally the best gaming CPU’ he said in our rundown of the best gaming processors. He also gave it credit for being backwards-compatible with DDR-4 systems, unlike AMD’s beastly but demanding Ryzen 7 7700.

US Deals:

If you’re in the UK, you’ll need to head over to Scan to grab the i5-13600k at a discount, where it’s currently down to £280 from £318. US customers, meanwhile can find it cheap on Amazon, where it’s down from $329 to an even better $270. Bboth prices are very respectable for what remains a fantastic CPU. On the other hand, if you’re after something even beefier, you can an always take a glance at our Best Black Friday PC Gaming deals.

For all our top picks of the Black Friday sales, check out our guides to the best Black Friday PC gaming deals and the best Black Friday Steam Deck accessories deals. We’ll be updating these with all the best-value offers on quality hardware as we find them.