It's finally a good time to buy a Raptor Lake CPU during Prime Big Deals Day

Intel's Raptor Lake Refresh (aka 14th Gen) CPUs have been tough to recommend over the past several months. Although you could find them readily available online, they almost never went on sale, often selling for above the prices we saw throughout the majority of last year. As Amazon's Big Deal Days event kicks off, Raptor Lake Refresh chips are finally seeing better prices, some of them hitting all-time lows.

Raptor Lake Refresh has remained a surprisingly relevant platform as DDR5 prices continue to push the cost of building a PC higher. Intel's 14th-Gen chips support DDR4 and DDR5, given you have a compatible motherboard, making them an easy upgrade path if you don't already have DDR5 memory. Keep in mind that DDR4 will give up about 13% of your gaming performance, however.

Earlier this year, Intel's Robert Hallock told Tom's Hardware Premium that Raptor Lake is a core part of Intel's strategy for "years to come," signaling a stabilization in …