best Desktop CPUs for under $300

I opted for this CPU since I use lots of virtual machines for my day-to-day programming tasks, so having hyper-threaded virtual cores is somewhat worthwhile.

The haters gonna hate regardless how great it is....the AMD fans are going to love it...the people who don't know what they are buying will be very pleased...easy to over-clock....super fast....great design.

The boxed cooler on this unit is almost embarrassingly small especially when this is an unlocked "K" model meant for overclocking.

Contrary to popular belief, multiple cores do less for gaming than hyper-threading does (tests with hyper-threading dual cores beat out true quad cores on the LGA775 arch)!

These CPUs come unlocked and are very easy to overclock.

With four cores and eight threads (thanks to Intel's Hyper-Threading technology), the Core i7-2600K processor definitely occupies a position in the upper ranges of Intel's new Sandy Bridge line.

I got this for the specific purpose of gaming and I already have a GTX 560 ti (soon to sli) so I didn't need an integrated graphics solution.

These results were obtained with the motherboard clock at its default 100 MHz.