How to Pick the Best Processor For Your Gaming PC

When you’re building a gaming PC, the first thing you’re likely thinking about is picking the best graphics card for the build, but your processor, or CPU, is just as important. For most people, something like the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D is going to be the best processor for gaming, thanks to its balance of price and performance.

Choosing the right processor is one of the most consequential decisions in any PC build. Your processor will determine which motherboard you need, along with how fast your RAM can get. Your processor might not determine how your games run too much, but picking the right chip can make everything else run smoothly.

• Gaming PCs are in a weird place right now

TL;DR – These Are the Best CPUs for Gaming:

As graphics cards have grown more powerful, the amount of weight put on your processor while gaming has decreased drastically. This means for most people, you don’t need to shell out hundreds of dollars for a top-end Core Ultra 9 or Ryzen 9 processor to get the best gaming performance. In fact, many mid-range processors can outperform top-end processors when it comes to pure gaming.

That sounds counterintuitive, but even as game engines have come to embrace multi-core processors over the last decade, they still value stronger individual cores with lower latency between them – which is why the Ryzen 7 9800X3D has become such a behemoth of a gaming processor with its 3D-stacked cache.

Additional contributions by Danielle Abraham

CPU Basics

There’s no way around it, the CPU is one of the most complex components in any gaming PC. There are so many little elements that make up a processor, but luckily you don’t need an engineering degree to have a good idea of what makes a CPU good for gaming.

Your first clue is going to be the name of the processor. Luckily, both Intel and AMD use similar naming conventions when it comes to the different tiers of processors. Team Blue and Team Red both denote each tier of processor with a number – typically 3, 5, 7 or 9 – with the higher number indicating a more powerful processor. So, an Intel Core i9 or Ryzen 9 processor is going to be significantly more powerful than a Core i3 or Ryzen 3 chip. For most people that just want to play PC games, a 5- or 7-series processor is going to be more than enough, especially with recent launches.

The tier classification will also be followed by a model number, but these do differ quite a lot between Intel and AMD. For Intel, a processor like the Core i9-14900K is a great example. The ‘14’ indicates the generation, where the ‘900’ notes where that processor lies in that generation’s lineup. The K just indicates that you can overclock the processor if you want to. There are other letters that Intel will follow its model numbers with, for instance ‘F’ means that processor does not have an integrated GPU.

AMD does things similarly. Take a look at the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X. Just like Intel, the first number indicates its generation, with the 9000 series being the latest-generation. The last three numbers show where it ranks within its own lineup. For the 9950X, it’s just a bit better than the 9900X from the same generation. The ‘X’ just indicates a higher-power version of the processor. AMD will typically launch non-X variants of its Ryzen processors partway through each generation, with lower clock speeds and power budgets than their ‘X’ counterparts. You should also keep an eye out for AMD processors that have a ‘G’ at the end of their model number. These processors have powerful integrated graphics, akin to a low-end dedicated GPU. These are typically referred to as APUs, or accelerated processing units.

The name of the processor alone won’t give you the full picture, though. Some people are just going to have to look at the specs to make sure a processor is right for them. There is a lot of terminology for processors, but when it comes to gaming there are a few that are more important than the rest.

Obviously, the easiest spec to figure out is CPU cores. Ever since the early 2000s most mainstream processors have multiple cores. Typically, having more cores is better, as they allow the CPU to multitask better. However, for gaming, there are diminished returns when you go above eight cores. While there are some PC games that love CPUs with a dozen or more cores, they’re few and far between. Instead, finding an 8-core, 16-thread processor with a high clock speed and a lot of L3 Cache is going to get you further than just adding more CPU cores to the equation.

L3 Cache, and Cache in general, is essentially super-fast memory that’s built into the CPU itself. Think of it like RAM on steroids. Most processors these days will have between 32–96MB of L3 cache, which doesn’t sound like a lot on paper. However, the CPU only needs to store data it needs constant access to in the cache, with less important data being stored temporarily in RAM. With how complex modern games are, having more L3 cache can directly lead to better gaming performance, especially in CPU-heavy games like Total War or World of Warcraft.

Clock speed is simply a measurement of how many cycles – essentially pulses of electricity – each CPU core can carry out each second. Modern processors can carry out thousands of instructions each second, with each generation improving IPC, or instructions per clock, performance. You can compare clock speed in processors in the same generation, and get a good idea of how fast each chip is in single-core workloads. However, that comparison muddies a bit when you look at two processors from separate generations. If an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X and an AMD Ryzen 9 3950X were both configured to run at 5.0GHz, the Ryzen 9 9950X would still be much faster.

Finally, it’s worth looking at a processor’s TDP to get a good estimate of power consumption and temperature. TDP stands for Thermal Design Power, and is an indicator of how much power it will consume on average, which will help you decide on a CPU cooler to pair with it. Keep in mind that most processors will consume more power than their TDP rating, especially during heavy workloads. For Intel processors, this is measured by “Maximum Turbo Power”. The recently-released Intel Core Ultra 9 285K has a TDP of 125W, but it reached 250W in my review. Likewise, AMD gives each of its processors a ‘PPT’ rating, or Package Power Tracking, which is essentially the same thing. In my review of the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X, which has a TDP of 170W, it would reach 200W in heavily threaded workloads. It’s important to keep in mind how much power your processor will need, especially if you’re pairing it with a power-hungry graphics card like the AMD Radeon RX 7900XTX or Nvidia RTX 4080 Super.

1. AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D

Best CPU for Gaming

While any modern processor is able to power a gaming PC, I recently reviewed the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D and found it to be way better at gaming than pretty much anything else on the market. That’s thanks primarily to the 3D V-cache the processor gets its name from. Basically, L3 cache is usually printed next to the CPU cores, with 3D V-cache, however, it’s printed below the CPU cores. That doesn’t sound like much of a difference, but it means the physical distance between the CPU cores and the cache is drastically reduced, cutting down on latency. This cache design also allows AMD to add more cache, with the 9800X3D having 96MB of L3 cache, compared to 32MB on the Ryzen 7 9700X – a 3x improvement.

This is especially important for PC games, which have a lot of data your CPU can store in cache. Games like Cyberpunk 2077 have the most to gain, thanks to the large amount of data that’s constantly being streamed between the CPU and graphics card. In my testing, then, I found the Ryzen 7 9800X3D would get a whopping 240 fps in Cyberpunk at ultra settings, compared to 174 fps with the Ryzen 7 9700X – a 72% improvement.

To be clear most games won’t see this drastic of a performance jump, with a lot of games instead getting a more stable framerate, rather than a higher average frame rate. Outside of games, though, the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D does lose some of its appeal. In apps like Adobe Premiere, the 9800X3D still falls behind more creative-oriented processors like the recently-released Intel Core Ultra 9 285K.

Still, if you’re building a gaming PC primarily for gaming and you don’t care about much else, it’s hard to argue that the Ryzen 7 9800X3D is the best processor for the job.

2. AMD Ryzen 9 9950X

Best High-Performance CPU for Gaming

3. AMD Ryzen 7 5700G

Best Budget CPU for Gaming

4. Intel Core i5-13400

Best Budget Intel CPU for Gaming

5. Intel Core i9-14900K

Fastest CPU for Gaming

6. AMD Ryzen 5 9600X

Best Non-X3D Ryzen CPU for Gaming

How Many CPU Cores Do I Need?

Back in the day, having one CPU core for your game, and another to run Windows in the background, would be enough for most games – but those days have passed. Most games these days will use between two and six cores by themselves, spreading out the workload to boost efficiency. For most people looking to play PC games, this means having a 6-core or 8-core processor will give you more than enough performance to handle even the most demanding games.

It does get a little bit more complicated if you’re getting an Intel processor from the last few years, however. You see, starting with 12th-generation processors in 2021, Intel started implementing a big.LITTLE design philosophy. Essentially, these chips have ‘big’ performance cores to handle heavy workloads like gaming, and ‘LITTLE’ cores that handle background tasks. This means Intel processors technically have more cores than their AMD equivalents, but not every core in the CPU is created equally. If you’re looking at an Intel CPU, you should aim for about 6 performance cores and 8 efficiency cores. That’ll get you about the same level of gaming performance as an AMD CPU with 6 cores and 12 threads, like the Ryzen 5 9600X.

There are plenty of processors with more than 8 cores, but those will be overkill for most people. While the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X has a staggering 16 cores and 32 threads, the only people who will really put that hardware to work are creative professionals doing CAD work.

AMD or Intel?

If you’re purely looking for the best gaming performance across the widest sample of PC games, you’re probably going to want to go with an AMD Ryzen processor. Specifically, the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D is still one of the strongest gaming processors ever, and is still outperforming Ryzen 9 and Intel Core i9 chips when playing games. And its successor is right around the corner.

However, while you will get better performance with an AMD X3D chip, it’s far from your only option. Basically any modern mainstream processor is going to be enough for even the most demanding PC games, especially when paired with a decent graphics card. When I reviewed the Intel Core Ultra 5 245K, it fell behind in gaming workloads, but it was still delivering more than 100 fps in both Cyberpunk 2077 and Total War: Warhammer 3.

The AMD vs. Intel choice is also deeper than just the CPU itself. After all, the processor you choose determines the motherboard you can pair with it. Again, if you just want to play PC games, the choice doesn’t matter that much from a pure performance perspective – at most you’ll get around a 4-5% performance difference between brands – but certain platforms are a bit easier to use in the long-term. For instance, AMD has committed to supporting its current AM5 socket until at least 2027, whereas Intel has just introduced an entirely new socket with its Core Ultra 200S processors that just came out. That generally represents each company’s approach to CPU sockets and chipsets: AMD usually supports its sockets for much longer than Intel. So, if you want to have room to upgrade again in a few years, Team Red is usually a safer bet. However, Intel does tend to have newer technology built into its chipsets with each generation, even if it comes at the cost of a new motherboard every time you upgrade.

Where to Get the best CPU for Gaming in the UK

Jackie Thomas is the Hardware and Buying Guides Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. You can follow her @Jackiecobra

Danielle Abraham is a freelance writer and unpaid music historian.