Best CPU for gaming in 2024 (2024)

The best gaming CPU is one of the most hotly contested titles in the industry, changing hands with each successive new generation of processors. Both Intel and AMD have some excellent CPU contenders in the mix, but on this hallowed page, we'll reveal the very best.

Now AMD has launched its mega-cache X3D CPUs we're seeing some stiff competition for Intel, andthe best gaming CPU is now the mighty AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D, although for a much more affordable option it'd be well worth your time to grab the best budget CPU, the Intel Core i5 13400F. TheIntel Core i5 13600Kis still the best CPU as an all-rounder, and that's true even now it's launched the 14th Gen, because the Core i9 14900K and Core i5 14600K are just refreshes of the previous chips, with little to no real-world performance gain.

On the more affordable side there's the Core i5 13400F. AMD also keeps making its Ryzen 5000-series CPUs just that much cheaper, which is great if you already have an AM4 motherboard and need an upgrade. And if you can't afford the ludicrous costs of a new graphics card in your PC build, the new AMD Ryzen 7 8700G can deliver 1080p gaming performance without the need for a discrete GPU.

The quick list

Best gaming CPU

The AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D is simply the best gaming CPU around right now. It's certainly the best gaming chip that AMD has ever made, but it's also capably outperforming Intel's top CPU when it comes to gaming frame rates, and is doing so for a lot less cash.

It's also a lot less thirsty, too.

That's possibly one of the most intriguing things about the 3D V-Cache processors of the Zen 4 generation—just how much more efficient they are than the first top-end chips of the Ryzen 7000-series. In fact, with every subsequent release of this new generation AMD has improved its latest processor range, making the previous ones almost redundant.

The Ryzen 9 7950X3D was the first of the new 3D V-Cache chips to hit our test bench, and it offers a mix of high-end gaming performance and a full 16-cores of Zen 4 processing. But its hybrid design, which offered one eight-core chiplet (or CCD) with the extra 64MB of L3 cache fused on top of it and another CCD without, demanded some extra hoops for the operating system to jump through, and also sacrificed some of a standard 16-core chip's raw multithreaded performance.

If you want the absolute highest gaming frame rates, and care not a jot for the CPU-intensive distractions of rendering or encoding, then AMD's latest chip is the processor for you. It wears its gaming predilections on its sleeve, and delivers performance that could make a Core i9 blush.

And at $450 it's a lot more than the Intel Core i5 13600K/F. That's a ~$300 chip that sports 14 cores and 20 threads of compute power. It will also top 5GHz and can actually be overclocked.

Sure, the Intel i5 delivers slightly slower 1080p gaming frame rates at 1080p, but that performance delta will all but vanish at 1440p and 4K. And in the productivity stakes you've then got a more rounded processor, one which is more capable at multi-threaded workloads if you're into doing anything with your PC other than purely gaming.

Plus you get another $150 to spend on your graphics card if you're looking at building a new machine from scratch. Though, admittedly in these times that doesn't necessarily equate to a higher tier of GPU…

But those are the sensible facts and figures, and the Ryzen 7 7800X3D is still the fastest gaming CPU I've ever tested. So, if you want the absolute highest possible frame rates the extra cacheola on top of this Zen 4 chiplet is going to do the business.

You want a cool and quiet gaming PC that's capable of the absolute fastest gaming frame rates? Then grab a 7800X3D, people.

Read our full AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D review.

Best budget CPU for gaming

For a gaming PC, there's no better value CPU than a Core i5. For most of 2022, we recommended the Core i5 12600K for thebest gaming CPUand the Core i5 12400 as the best gaming CPU on a budget. Last year, theCore i5 13600Ktook over the top spot. And now, the Core i5 13400F pushes Alder Lake out of the running with an even more impressive specification for the money, making it the best budget CPU you can currently buy.

The Intel Core i5 13400F is a processor I've been waiting patiently to test since I first heard wind of it last year. You'll understand why once you read these specs: A 10-core processor made up of six Performance-cores (P-cores) and four Efficient-cores (E-cores), the Core i5 13400F has a total of 16 threads. Its fastest cores will run up to 4.6GHz out of the box, a clock speed that wouldn't have seemed out of place on the box of a Core i7 only a few years back.

For that impressive spec, the Core i5 has been given an Intel-recommended price tag of $196. Consider the other options: that's a handful of dollars more than theCore i5 12400from years previous, or $33 cheaper than AMD's Ryzen 5 7600.

All of which means, as someone who has been happily running an Intel Core i7 6700K over the past six or seven years, and which now resides in a PC I built for my partner, this is the first time I've considered upgrading my old 6700K for something newer.

The Core i5 13400F is only a handful of frames shy of the Core i9 13900K in Total War: Three Kingdoms, Metro Exodus, and F1 2021. In Far Cry 6, this chip is significantly slower than Intel's high-end processors, however, showing Far Cry 6 to be a more CPU-limited game than the others. To a lesser extent, the same is true for Shadow of the Tomb Raider.

Yet even in these two games where the Core i5 13400F falls off the pace of the faster 13th Gen processors, it remains quicker than last year's best gaming CPU, the Core i5 12600K. It's also significantly faster than the Core i5 12400, though is more power-hungry for it.

In our testing, neither the Core i5 13400F or Ryzen 5 7600X can claim an outright win across the testing suite, though when AMD's chip is faster, it is quite a bit faster. AMD's chip does come out as the clear winner on the productivity and content creation side of things, but it is that much more expensive for it. AMD-compatible motherboards have tended to fall on the expensive side versus the cheaper Intel-compatible 600-series boards, but there are now some cheaper options coming through. That said, the Core i5 13400F is around $210 on Newegg at time of writing, and the Ryzen 5 7600 is only $229.

Intel's platform is surprisingly cheap for the inclusion of both the latest 700-series motherboards and older 600-series motherboards. Similarly, we're saving a little cash here on the 'F' designated model. The 'F' denotes the Core i5 13400F's lack of integrated graphics, which isn't a deal breaker by any stretch of the imagination. Generally, that integrated GPU isn't going to come much in handy for gaming, and even today's cheapest discrete graphics card will outperform it by a country mile.

While the Core i5 13600K remains the pick for the best gaming CPU, and AMD is very competitive in the ~$275 market, Intel's Core i5 13400F is a shoe-in for the best budget gaming CPU in 2023.

Read our full Intel Core i5 13400F review.

The best all-rounder CPU

The Intel Core i5 13600K is another mighty mid-range chip from Intel, and you can expect a major uplift in core counts even with this more parsimoniously priced Raptor Lake chip. Well-tuned to deliver high gaming frame rates, this is ultimately the chip most gamers should consider first for their next gaming PC. It's cheaper than the newer Core i5 14600K, but has the same essential core makeup and actually performs identically.

The Core i5 13600K is a 14-core processor, made up of six Hyper-Threaded Performance-cores (P-cores) and eight Efficient-cores (E-cores), for a total of 20 threads. That's four more E-cores than this chip's predecessor, theCore i5 12600K, but don't be fooled by the E-cores's diminutive name and silicon footprint.

Those four extra cores make for a significant increase in multithreaded performance. The Core i5 13600K's single-threaded Cinebench score? Exactly the same as a Core i9 12900K.

Alright, real-life performance won't see the Core i5 13600K matching the Core i9 12900K in every regard, but it really does deliver something similar in gaming for a lot less money. In three out of six games I've tested, the Core i5 13600K matches the pace of the Core i9 12900K.

We're once again seeing the best gaming chip come from the lower rungs of the stack with Raptor Lake. The Core i5 13600K delivers exceptional gaming performance in a sensibly priced package, delivering only a handful of frames less than the processors that fetch double the asking price. For a gaming PC build in 2023, this is absolutely the chip I'd recommend to most.

But I'd go one further than that. The inclusion of four more E-cores turns this processor into a 14-core chip with the multithreaded performance to deliver in high-demand applications, and that makes it a great fit for streaming, content creation, editing, and more.

The Core i5 13600K is much more of an all-round powerhouse than I had expected it to be.

Read our full Intel Core i5 13600K review.

Best high-end Intel CPU

Intel's Core i9 13900K is spectacularly good at what it does, and what it does is pretty much everything, which makes it the best high-end Intel CPU overall. Gaming? Of course, it can push high frame rates alongside the latest GPUs. Multitasking? Yep, easy. With 24 cores it's perfectly suited to lots of stuff happening all at once. High-demand creative workloads? Absolutely, it barely breaks a sweat.

Intel's hybrid architecture has really come into its own with the Core i9 13900K, though hasn't really pushed anything forward with its Core i9 14900K refresh. And that's why we're still sticking with this cheaper chip, that performs just as well. Throw it at any problem, and it's likely going to solve it in record time.

The Core i9 13900K actually makes ex-HEDT chips look slow by comparison. In fact, Intel's Core i9 13900K is almost 10,000 points clear of the Core i9 12900K in Cinebench R23. In the Blender Junk Shop benchmark, the Core i9 13900K is 60% faster than the Alder Lake chip.

If you want lots of speedy threads to throw at creative apps, this is it.

When it comes to gaming performance, the Core i9 13900K is equally impressive. This chip does little to hold back a modern high-end GPU, such as the RTX 3080 we're testing with, and I have no doubts it'll make the best pairing with Nvidia's new RTX 4090, too. Minimum and 1%/0.1% lows were also impressively high and consistently so, which is a good marker of CPU performance nowaday.

Now for some PC builders, that's an easy buy. This chip is immense at everything it does. But I would suggest thatmostPC gamers with a moderate budget will want to look at theIntel Core i5 13600K, and anyone looking for the pure pace in games to look at AMD's Ryzen 7 7800X3D.

But to say the Core i9 13900K is too expensive would be wrong. It's actually, surprisingly priced roughly the same as a Core i9 12900K, despite being much faster, offering eight more cores, and arriving on a now cheaper platform.

I'm not going to belabour the point. This is a mighty processor at a surprisingly reasonable price for a high-end chip, and a lot of builders will want one simply because it's the best of the best.

Read our full Intel Core i9 13900K review.

Best high-end AMD CPU

The AMD Ryzen 9 7950X was the vanguard for a whole new generation of CPUs and GPUs from the red team. But, despite its many advances, a whole new AM5 motherboard platform, and shiny heatspreader design, this isn't thebest gaming CPUwe were hoping for.

I mean, it's good. And certainly smashes the 16-coreRyzen 9 5950Xfrom the Zen 3 generation, but this Zen 4 chip has a resurgent Intel CPU architecture to deal with in Alder Lake and Raptor Lake. With the Core i9 13900K offering so many cores itself now, it's very much encroaching on the hallowed high core count space of the Ryzen 7 7950X.

The Ryzen 9 7950X is an evolution of the Zen 3 design, and is at once a brute of a processor, running at the ragged edge of its thermal constraints, and yet with an impressively elegant design. Even on the outside—Yeah, I'll say it, I love that new heatspreader look.

But it's still not the processor I'd pick up today and there's a chance it might get savaged out there for being more of a derivative than a revolutionary CPU. There's no spectacular new tech on display, no vertically bonded cache chips, no extra cores, just a healthy clock speed bump, some finessed microarchitecture, and a new socket.

It is certainly fast. I did a bit of a double take checking out the numbers when I saw the Cinebench R23 single thread run tipping the odd core up to 5.9GHz. Even stable at 5.8GHz was pretty shocking. It's not quite that high under all-core load, but 5.4GHz across all 16 cores still makes it one blazing chip.

It's blazing in another way, too, because damn, does this thing get hot?! Actually, no. It's okay. AMD says that "At 95 degrees it is not running hot, rather it will intentionally go to this temperature as much as possible under load because the power management system knows that this is the ideal way to squeeze the most performance out of the chip without damaging it."

But does fast and hot make it the ultimate gaming processor? Not really, not at all in fact. On that score, it will often get outperformed by the eight-core Ryzen 7 7700X which launches alongside it. It is comfortably faster than the previous generation's Ryzen 9 5950X, which is important, especially as that was priced some $100 higher on release.

You will likely see a lot made about it being a disappointing release. But, to me, it feels like a confident, consistent release. You could argue it's maybe not super ambitious, but AMD has got where it is today by always delivering on its Zen promises, and yet again Dr. Su's gang has absolutely done that.

The Ryzen 9 7950X is great for throwing cores at a problem and making it go away, but it's not quite the all-round best gaming CPU we were hoping for.

Read our full AMD Ryzen 9 7950X review.

Best AMD AM4 CPU upgrade

At launch, the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D was the fastest gaming processor the red team had ever made. It's not so much anymore, but it remains the best bet for gaming performance if you're stuck with an AM4 motherboard.

AMD's chip was and still is a technically impressive beast, using the latest packaging processes from TSMC to bung an inordinate amount of cache into its new CPU. Because, after all, what do you do when you can't squeeze any higher frequencies out of your processor architecture? You stick a whole lot more cache memory into it and hope for the best. That's what AMD has done on the GPU side with its Infinity Cache, pairing up to 128MB with its RDNA 2 graphics cards, to great effect, and now it's doing the same to its CPUs.

The Ryzen 7 5800X3D is architecturally identical to the standardRyzen 7 5800X, using the same Zen 3 processor design, and therefore the same chiplet setup that has made AMD's recent generations of CPU such world-beaters. That means you're getting the same eight-core, 16-thread layout in a single chiplet (so no potential inter-chiplet latency issues), but a slightly slower clock speed because of a necessarily lower voltage.

In general, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D either essentially matches or outperforms the Ryzen 9 5950X. That's a great result considering the top Ryzen is still an expensive CPU, and more than ever just a productivity chip and little else. There are also a few times where the CPU outperforms the standard Core i9 12900K, which again is a great achievement. Though, for the most part, it lags behind the Golden Cove microarchitecture of the Alder Lake part when it comes to gaming. Let alone Raptor Lake.

It's a technically elegant, efficient CPU that delivers on its promises. It can't quite beat Intel's hulking brute of a Core i9 12900KS in the frame rate war, but it still offers the majority of AMD users an easy upgrade path to gaming performance that is not far off. And for a fraction of the price and power demands, too.

Read our full AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D review.

Best integrated graphics in a CPU

In case you haven't noticed, graphics cards are pretty expensive. If that puts you off PC gaming, then AMD has something for you: TheRyzen8000-series APUs include the most powerful integrated graphics ever, and the Ryzen 7 8700G is the top chip of the lot. They're positioned to challenge entry level graphics cards, meaning you might not even need a graphics card for 1080p gaming today.

It's been over a year since AMD announced its Phoenix range of laptop processors. They took their time to come to market, but we did get a good idea of what to expect from a desktop APU by looking at devices like theAsus ROG Ally. Though ostensibly a handheld, it's capable of functioning as a desktop replacement when docked, and delivers genuine gaming performance. If a power-restricted APU in a handheld can do that, its unleashed potential in a desktop form factor sounds pretty exciting to me.

It's now well over a year since the launch of AMD's Zen 4 based Ryzen 7000-series CPUs. They're generally an evolutionary upgrade over the Zen 3 5000-series models. A tweaked front end, a doubling of L2 cache, AVX-512 support and improved branch prediction helped to deliver an IPC gain of around 13%. Add to that clock speed improvements partly thanks to a shift to TSMC's 5nm process (for the Core Complex Dies) and we've got ourselves a competitive AMD CPU family.

The 8700G incorporates many of these improvements, but itisa different beast. Most especially it uses a monolithic die as opposed to the chiplet design of the regular 7000-series CPUs. It includes a dedicated XDNA AI engine, but the major selling point of the 8000-series APUs are their integrated graphics. The Radeon 700M series graphics with up to 12 compute units are powerful enough to play pretty much any current game at 1080p, especially if you enable AMD's upscaling technologies.

But the major selling point of the 8700G is its graphics capabilities. The 8700G includes the top-of-the-line Radeon 780M integrated graphics. It's the most powerful integrated graphics solution ever seen on the desktop. It's based on the RDNA 3 architecture with 12 CUs giving it 768 shader cores clocked at up to 2.9GHz. The Vega 8 IGP of the 5700G is 3 generations behind and clocked at just 2.0GHz. It's not even in the same ballpark.

While I'm happy to shout about the gaming performance of the 8700G, I'm less impressed with its all round CPU performance. Gamers with discrete graphics cards should look towards one of AMD's 7000-series CPUs, or even something like the still excellentRyzen 7 5800X3Dif you're sticking with AM4. That's without even mentioning the plethora of Intel 12th, 13th and 14th Gen options.

Read our full AMD Ryzen 7 8700G review.

Processor FAQ

CPU review list

AMD CPU reviews:

• AMD Ryzen 5 8600G
• AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D
• AMD Ryzen 9 7950X
• AMD Ryzen 9 7900
• AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D
• AMD Ryzen 7 7700X
• AMD Ryzen 7 7700
• AMD Ryzen 9 5950X
• AMD Ryzen 9 5900X
• AMD Ryzen 7 5800X
• AMD Ryzen 7 5700G
• AMD Ryzen 5 5600X
• Threadripper 3970X and 3960X
• AMD Ryzen 9 3950X
• AMD Ryzen 9 3900XT
• AMD Ryzen 9 3900X
• AMD Ryzen 7 3800XT
• AMD Ryzen 7 3700X
• AMD Ryzen 5 3600XT
• AMD Ryzen 7 2700X
• AMD Ryzen 5 2600X
• AMD Ryzen 5 2400G
• AMD Ryzen 3 2200G
• AMD Ryzen 7 1800X, 1700X, and 1700
• Threadripper 1950X and 1920X
• AMD Ryzen 5 1600X, 1600, 1500X, and 1500
• AMD Ryzen 3 1300X and 1200

Intel CPU reviews:

• Intel Core i9 14900K
• Intel Core i7 14700K
• Intel Core i5 14600K
• Intel Core i9 13900K
• Intel Core i5 13600K
• Intel Core i5 13400F
• Intel Core i9 12900K
• Intel Core i5 12600K
• Intel Core i5 12400
• Intel Core i9 11900K
• Intel Core i5 11600K
• Intel Core i5 11400F
• Intel Core i9 10980XE
• Intel Core i9 10900K
• Intel Core i5 10600K
• Intel Core i9 9900K
• Intel Core i7 9700K
• Intel Core i9 7980XE
• Intel Core i9 7960X
• Intel Core i9 7900X
• Intel Core i7 8700K
• Intel Core i7 7700K and Core i5 7600K
• Intel Core i5 8400

CPU jargon buster

Caching - A small segment of high-speed memory dedicated to storing and executing frequently used commands/instructions to speed up software execution. CPUs contain caches designated as Level 1, 2, and 3, with L1 being the fastest and smallest and L3 being the slowest and largest.

Core - Modern CPUs can contain anywhere from two to 70+ cores (in supercomputers), though CPUs housed in most consumer machines will generally carry between four and eight, with AMD's latest CPUs sporting up to 16 cores.

Clock speed - The speed at which a CPU can execute instructions, measured in hertz. A processor with a 3.7 GHz clock speed can process 3.7 billion instructions a second. Clock speed is one of the most critical factors for determining performance in games and workload functions.

Heat sink - A cooling solution for PCs that utilize fans or liquid cooling (active) or aluminum radiators (passive) that rely on convection to regulate a component's temperature.

Hyper-Threading (SMT) - Intel terminology for a tech that allows a processor to handle two sets of instructions 'threads' simultaneously. AMD and other CPU vendors call this SMT, Simultaneous Multi-Threading.

Socket type LGA (Land Grid Array), PGA (Pin Grid Array), or BGA (Ball Grid Array) - The way a CPU interfaces with the socket on a motherboard. LGA is used on Intel sockets with pins as part of the socket. AMD's AM4 solution, PGA, has the processors' pins, which fit into holes on the socket. AMD's Threadripper CPUs also use LGA sockets. A BGA socket is when the processor is permanently soldered to the motherboard, typically on a laptop.

TDP - Thermal design power, the maximum amount of heat a system or chip can produce that the attendant cooling system is designed to deal with under workload. This term can apply to PCs as a whole, GPUs, CPUs, or nearly any other performance component that generates heat and is in large part an indicator of how much power a part draws.

Thread - A thread refers to a series of CPU instructions for a specific program. Older CPUs and SMT disabled run one thread per core, but most modern AMD and Intel CPUs can simultaneously run two threads, sharing some resources (e.g., cache).

Turbo Boost - Intel technology that allows processors to run at higher clock speeds under demanding loads. AMD also supports turbo or boost clocks, and we use the terms interchangeably regardless of CPU vendor.

See comments