From everything I've seen the 9900K still goes for big $$$ even today. If looking for better gaming performance, are you sure it's the CPU holding you back? What CPU are you upgrading from? Unless you're running a high end GPU (think RTX 3080 and above or RX 6800XT and above) there's a good chance that changing your CPU will have little to no effect.
Hey, thanks for the comment. I can see they’re going for $450-500 from trade me history.
I have a 9600k 6-core single thread atm and a 2070 super although the GPU will be getting upgraded before the end of the year.
Main reason I want to upgrade the CPU is that I got into Star Citizen which is heavy CPU and the 9600k can’t cut it, so much stuttering it sits at 100% on all cores constantly.
I was thinking of just going full replacement with AMD but the cost to do it all plus the GPU seems excessive, if I just buy the 9900k and a new GPU it will work out much cheaper.
Yeah the lack of hyperthreading really hurt the 8th/9th gen i5. Have you considered a jump to Intel 12th gen? An i5-12400F and a decent B660 (DDR4) combo is under $600 and you could use your current DDR4 ram. You could probably get $200+ for your 9600K and motherboard, putting you on a faster platform for less than the ~$450-500 cost of a 9900K alone? (Although you'd get some of that back for the 9600K). You probably did the same math when considering the AMD system... (R5 5600 + B550 = ~$500). You may need to change ram with AMD though...
It would be that cheap if I weren’t solely on ITX builds, it’s impossible to find an itx B550 or B460 ITX board for under $400 alone (apart from the one on on tech thats delivered in December), then the cost of the CPU would probably push it up to $700 in total hence looking at a 9900k.
I wish NZ had more on the second hand ITX market, or just PC parts in general, I checked out eBay and there’s loads of cheap B550 ITX boards.
JClarkeNZ: It would be that cheap if I weren’t solely on ITX builds, it’s impossible to find an itx B550 or B460 ITX board for under $400 alone (apart from the one on on tech thats delivered in December), then the cost of the CPU would probably push it up to $700 in total hence looking at a 9900k.
I wish NZ had more on the second hand ITX market, or just PC parts in general, I checked out eBay and there’s loads of cheap B550 ITX boards.
The only caveat with these, (from what I've read), is that they are "repurposed" motherboards that had trouble running their PCI-e x16 slot at PCI-e 4.0 speed, so it is limited to PCI-e 3.0 speed. It does require DDR5 ram though...
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