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The best CPU for gaming in 2022
Included in this guide:
The best CPU for gaming ways the fastest flake, with the most cores, in your price range. That might be the lofty Intel Core i9 12900K, or AMD Ryzen nine 5900X, though it could just also exist the bang-for-your-buck Intel Core i5 12400. Information technology's almost cost to performance, and what you're using your PC for most of the time.
The good news is that there are plenty of groovy processors out there at affordable price points right now. Indeed, with the launch of Intel's twelfth Gen Alder Lake family, the best processor for gaming isn't the all-singing, all-dancing halo bit at the peak of Intel'due south lineup, but one a petty further down the pecking lodge. Yous'll notice the Intel Core i5 12600K newly installed at the tiptop of our list, and for very skillful reason—it offers crawly gaming operation at a bang-up toll signal.
Value for money is important, if only because it means you can spend more of your budget on other things like SSDs, ameliorate motherboards, more than memory, or maybe, simply maybe, a better graphics bill of fare at some betoken—if the silicon shortage ever ends. Saving a few dollars here and there on the core components can lead to a much amend overall gaming PC. That's something we can definitely go behind.
Every chip on this list has been tested through our intense CPU benchmarking suite on our PC Gamer test rig. This is made up of enough of the latest games besides as 3D and video rendering workloads, only because we're all content creators and streamers at present. Games are still the nearly important tests for us though, hopefully for obvious reasons.
Make sure yous too bank check our guide to the all-time gaming motherboard if you lot are planning to do a brand new build.
The best CPU for gaming
Intel'due south 12th Gen Alder Lake processors are a vital return to form for Intel. Its underlying hybrid pattern was seen as a take a chance when it was starting time appear, with its combo of performance and efficient cores not patently bringing much to the desktop experience. It's a gamble that has unquestionably paid off though, and the gaming performance offered past Intel'southward latest CPUs is nothing curt of incredible.
The Core i5 12600K is the standout processor for gamers considering it not but offers great gaming functioning beyond the board, but it does so at a price signal that isn't going to reduce y'all to tears. It not only beats the similarly priced 5600X in pretty much every game, only information technology outperforms the $750 Ryzen 9 5950X in plenty of tests as well. That it soundly beats the Core i9 11900K is just the icing on the cake. Swell for a $320 mid-range chip.
As this is a new platform, you will need to pick upwards a new motherboard and probably new memory while you lot're at it—Alder Lake supports DDR5 as well as DDR4. That means the initial outlay may be a bit more than you lot planned, but the performance is worth information technology, and information technology isn't a power-draining beast either, so you won't need an outlandish cooler to get the most from it. Throw in future-looking support for PCIe 5.0 and nosotros take a new gaming CPU king. Long live the king.
Read our full Intel Cadre i5 12600K review.
That the Core i5 12600K takes the meridian spot is hard to argue with—awesome performance at a good price will exercise that—but Intel's summit scrap hitting the second spot may be a little more surprising. The reasoning here is that the vast majority of gamers should get the Core i5, leaving this second spot covering those that need even more operation.
If you're building a high-end PC not simply for high-cease, 4K gaming, only for more serious pursuits like 3D rendering and video editing, so this is the chip for you. Information technology's a powerhouse, no question about it, just one that actually needs a system congenital around it to brand it shine—you'll need a beefy PSU to go that absolute best from it, and a serious cooler wouldn't hurt either. The fact that there is plenty of overclocking headroom will let you to push it to a whole new level likewise.
When it comes to gaming performance, this is the fastest chip out there, by a considerable margin. The trouble is, you only become a few more than frames per second over our top recommendation and yous have to pay royally for the privelige. And even when you're ownership an 'ethusiast' class CPU, you still demand to have an eye on overall value for money.
Read our full Intel Core i9 12900K review.
The Core i5 12400 is nearing on legendary status in the Alder Lake lineup, and that's considering of its unprecedented ability to overclock where it shouldn't. The lack of a 'K' at the end of the Core i5 12400's name should denote its lack of overclocking prowess, just somewhere in the silicon it has the ability for BCLK overclocking.
With a motherboard capable of taking advantage of the Core i5 12400's overclocking ability, we managed to push button this little fleck that could to 5.2GHz rather happily. It didn't run too hot or too power hungry to do it, either, though you will need to be considerate of cooling potential earlier attempting this.
Similarly, Intel doesn't recommend anyone does this—though that's true of pretty much any overclocking nowadays. The company also could close the door on the not-K-series overclocking at some point, so go on that in mind if that's the sole reason you're thinking of purchasing this chip.
If you're non looking to overclock in the slightest, however, don't fret. The Core i5 12400 was already impressive without its clandestine ability, and with cooler included at this toll tag, information technology's 1 helluva great deal.
Read our full Intel Core i5 12400 review.
AMD's Zen compages has improved with each generation, merely the fact that AMD managed to knock out a 19 percent IPC improvement with Zen 3 is nothing short of staggering. The key takeaway for united states of america equally gamers is that this comeback ways AMD pushed Intel to ameliorate, and amend it did with Alder Lake.
Whatever resolution you are gaming at, this processor can handle it and continue your graphics menu of selection fed with many juicy frames. The fact that this is a 12-core, 24-thread monster means that it can cope with anything else y'all throw at it as well. So if you lot have dreams of 3D rendering, video editing, or any other serious tasks, you'll know that you lot accept the raw grunt to handle it. That information technology won't hold you back when gaming makes information technology even sweeter.
The only real downside is the pricing and the dropping of the Wraith cooler—don't forget to factor in when you buy. You practice get what y'all pay for, though, and this is a phenomenal chip for gaming and anything else you might desire to practise.
If yous're in the market for absolute ability, you could pace up to the Ryzen nine 5950X, which gives you 16 cores and 32 threads. However, it costs $250 more, and for gaming purposes and even most content creation chores, the 5900X is more than than sufficient.
Read our full AMD Ryzen 9 5900X review.
The Ryzen v 5600X has lost some of its polish since the Core i5 12400 released—Intel's scrap but pips information technology in gaming performance and is available for a off-white bit less coin. That said, the reason nosotros still feel the Ryzen 5 5600X worth mentioning is that, while it'south a great chip in its own correct, it's also a lot cheaper if you're upgrading from some other older AM4-compatible processor.
Say y'all have a B450 motherboard in your PC today with a previous generation AMD Ryzen chip, you lot could make a simple swap for the Ryzen v 5600X if you wanted to. That could salvage you a lot of cash on a uniform motherboard, which you'd definitely need to drop if you picked up an Intel 12th Gen chip.
In that location's also very little between any of the Ryzen 5000 fries in games, which ways you lot'll striking the aforementioned frame rates with this scrap as you will the more expensive Ryzen ix 5900X. Which is incredible when y'all think about it—height-tier performance from the almost affordable Zen 3 CPU? We'll say yes to that every single day.
This does have half the cadre count of the 5900X, rolling in as it does with six cores and 12 threads. Yet, this is merely an issue with those more serious workloads, which is more than sufficient for more reasonable stuff.
The Ryzen v 5600X too bucks the Ryzen 5000 family unit's trend by shipping with a Wraith Stealth cooler, so you lot don't accept to drop extra money on a third-party chiller. You don't need to, but if you do, you'll hit higher clocks for longer and also open up upwardly the wonderful globe of overclocking, which could make it worthwhile. This is a decent little overclocker, and while it won't touch on gaming much, it'll assist in other areas nicely.
Read our full AMD Ryzen 5 5600X review.
The Cadre i5 10400F is a surprisingly exciting option. Even long after its first release engagement, this processor is withal available at a not bad toll. Not only that, it's slightly faster than the Core i5 9400 that came before it, but that F-suffix means it ditches the Intel integrated graphics completely. That'due south not a problem for gamers unless you want to use QuickSync, although Nvidia's NVENC is arguably ameliorate anyway. Overall, information technology'southward an splendid budget-friendly choice that doesn't toll much more than than a Core i3 part.
There are other compromises, like the locked multiplier—no overclocking here. But y'all tin relieve money and grab an H470 motherboard. At least you lot get a libation in the box, something we'd like to encounter as an option with every CPU. Most boards will happily run the 10400F at 3.9GHz, then don't worry virtually the low base of operations clock.
While the i5 10400F may not exist every bit fast as other CPUs in multithreaded tests, in our gaming suite, it's tied with AMD's 3900X. Hereafter games may beginning to push beyond its six-core capabilities, but probably not before you're gear up for an upgrade. Right at present, the i5 10400F is enough fast and extremely affordable.
AMD's APUs are the best processors to drop into your rig if you lot're not going to employ a discrete graphics card, but still desire a modicum of gaming functioning out of your organization. And the AMD Ryzen 7 5700G is the best of the latest Zen 3 based chips to deliver that.
Unlike previous APU offerings from AMD, the Ryzen seven 5700G is far more of a jack-of-all-trades chip considering we are talking near an viii-core Zen 3 CPU component with xvi threads and a powerful Vega-based GPU to back it up. That makes this a chip that'due south nigh upwards there with the best of the Ryzen 5000-series CPUs in processing power, simply with the graphical grunt to deliver 1080p gaming on low settings in some seriously demanding titles.
In a GPU drought, that makes the 5700G a tantalizing APU every bit it will become your new gaming PC up and running. At the same time, you wait for discrete graphics cards to be available and without compromising also heavily on your system performance in the concurrently.
The issue is that, as the 5700G is a monolithic design rather than chiplet, in that location are some performance differences compared to the standard Ryzen seven 5800X, a straight 8-core, 16-thread CPU without graphics. Information technology also lacks PCIe 4.0 support to run the fastest SSDs and demands high-speed retention to make the nigh of its GPU ability. But it'due south still an first-class all-effectually AMD processor and a handy pick when graphics cards are still and then rare.
Read our AMD Ryzen 7 5700G review.
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The all-time CPU for gaming FAQ
How do you lot exam CPUs?
While gaming resolutions run from 720p to 4K, we largely test at 1080p. This will show the nigh significant difference in gaming functioning you're likely to see and pushes the CPU into the spotlight instead of the GPU—an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 in this case.
We utilise a mix of motherboards depending on the platform, merely all loftier-end to ensure as level a playing field equally we can. These boards include the Asus ROG Maximus Z690 Hero, MSI MPG Z490 Carbon WiFi, and Gigabyte X570 Aorus Master.
When information technology comes to memory, we use Corsair's Dominator DDR5 RAM at 5,200MHz effective for twelfth Gen Intel processors, while 11th Gen processors are tested using Corsair Vengeance Pro RGB sticks at 3,600MHz effective. The AMD test rig uses Thermaltake DDR4 3,600MHz constructive.
To further eliminate whatever bottlenecks, a loftier-speed PCIe four.0 NVMe SSD was used across each arrangement, each loaded with Windows eleven and our suite of benchmarking applications and games.
Liquid cooling is also used on all examination rigs to ensure these fries are not restricted thermally.
Our benchmark suite includes 3DMark Time Spy, Civ 6'southward turn criterion, Total War: Iii Kingdoms, Assassin's Creed: Valhalla, Metro Exodus, F1 2021, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Cinebench R23, SiSoft Sandra, x264 v5, and PCMark 10.
Where can I read all of PC Gamer's CPU reviews?
AMD CPU reviews:
- AMD Ryzen 9 5950X
- AMD Ryzen ix 5900X
- AMD Ryzen vii 5800X
- AMD Ryzen seven 5700G
- AMD Ryzen 5 5600X
- Threadripper 3970X and 3960X
- AMD Ryzen 9 3950X
- AMD Ryzen nine 3900XT
- AMD Ryzen ix 3900X
- AMD Ryzen 7 3800XT
- AMD Ryzen seven 3700X
- AMD Ryzen 5 3600XT
- AMD Ryzen 7 2700X
- AMD Ryzen seven 1800X, 1700X, and 1700
- Threadripper 1950X and 1920X
- AMD Ryzen 5 2600X
- AMD Ryzen 5 2400G
- AMD Ryzen 5 1600X, 1600, 1500X, and 1500
- AMD Ryzen 3 2200G
- AMD Ryzen three 1300X and 1200
Intel CPU reviews:
- Intel Core i9 12900K
- Intel Core i5 12600K
- Intel Core i5 12400
- Intel Cadre i9 11900K
- Intel Cadre i5 11600K
- Intel Cadre i5 11400F
- Intel Core i9 10980XE
- Intel Core i9 10900K
- Intel Core i5 10600K
- Intel Core i9 9900K
- Intel Cadre i7 9700K
- Intel Core i9 7980XE
- Intel Core i9 7960X
- Intel Core i9 7900X
- Intel Core i7 8700K
- Intel Cadre i7 7700K and Cadre i5 7600K
- Intel Cadre i5 8400
What motherboard is right for my CPU?
Alder Lake is the most recent platform to be released, and while initially only Z690 motherboards were bachelor, Intel and its partners take since released cheaper chipset such every bit H670, B660, and H610. These are available supporting DDR5 (new) and DDR4, and so pick that side of things carefully.
The latest AMD Ryzen 5000 CPUs still apply the AM4 socket and are only compatible with X570, B550, and A520 motherboards (oh, and B450 and X470 motherboards).
Whereas Intel's Comet Lake chips use the LGA 1200 socket, Rocket Lake introduced 500-series boards. Unless you're desperate for the notwithstanding slightly awkward Intel PCIe 4.0 solution which the latest Intel chips offering, get with either a Z490 or cheaper B460 motherboard to save some greenbacks.
Is Intel or AMD meliorate?
This is a rather loaded question. AMD has held the top spot for a long time, with its Zen architecture making for some incredible leaps in functioning, simply Intel has stolen the crown with its Alder Lake family, specifically the Core i5 12600K. The fact that information technology's a completely new kind of hybrid CPU is nearly past the by, it's just a actually strongly performing chip.
It's worth remembering that most games are GPU-express, which means the graphics carte is the limiting factor in terms of operation, and you lot would likely see the aforementioned essential frame rates with either CPU manufacturer when a detached graphics card is used. This is specially true every bit you up the resolution, with 4K having picayune between the peak chips.
Should I overclock my CPU?
The honest answer is: no. Overclocking your processor is not necessarily the risky motion information technology once was, simply equally, the benefits of doing then accept drastically dropped in recent times. When we're talking about gaming performance, having a slightly college clocked CPU can make a chip of a deviation, simply arguably your graphics card will be the part that limits the speed of your organization.
At that place is also the signal that overclocked CPUs create more rut, require more intensive and expensive cooling solutions, need those coolers to work harder, and are, therefore, frequently louder.
For us, overclocking your CPU to gain real-world performance benefits is not something we'd recommend well-nigh PC gamers exercise.
Jargon buster
Caching - A small segment of loftier-speed memory defended to storing and executing ofttimes used commands/instructions to speed up software execution. CPUs contain caches designated as Level 1, 2, and 3, with L1 beingness the fastest and smallest and L3 being the slowest and largest.
Cadre - Modernistic CPUs tin contain anywhere from two to lxx+ cores (in supercomputers), though CPUs housed in most consumer machines volition generally carry between four and eight, with AMD's latest CPUs sporting up to 16 cores.
Clock speed - The speed at which a CPU tin execute instructions, measured in hertz. A processor with a three.7 GHz clock speed can process 3.7 billion instructions a 2nd. Clock speed is one of the most critical factors for determining functioning 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'south 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 (State Grid Array), PGA (Pin Grid Assortment), or BGA (Brawl Grid Array) - The style a CPU interfaces with the socket on a motherboard. LGA is used on Intel sockets with pins every bit function of the socket. AMD'due south AM4 solution, PGA, has the processors' pins, which fit into holes on the socket. AMD's Threadripper CPUs also utilize 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 corporeality of oestrus a system or chip can produce that the attendant cooling system is designed to bargain with under workload. This term can apply to PCs as a whole, GPUs, CPUs, or nearly any other operation component that generates estrus and is in large part an indicator of how much power a role draws.
Thread - A thread refers to a series of CPU instructions for a specific program. Older CPUs and SMT disabled run one thread per cadre, only almost modern AMD and Intel CPUs can simultaneously run ii threads, sharing some resource (e.grand., cache).
Turbo Boost - Intel engineering that allows processors to run at college clock speeds nether enervating loads. AMD as well supports turbo or boost clocks, and we utilise the terms interchangeably regardless of CPU vendor.
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