Best gaming CPU 2024

The gaming CPU crown firmly sits with the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D thanks to its 3D V-Cache technology. This perky processor punches well above its weight, costing just $449 / £439, and handily competes with more expensive flagship options.

The 96MB of L3 cache inside the 7800X3D does wonders to boost the floor and ceiling of frame rates, ensuring that you’re getting all the pixel-pushing juice out of your graphics card. Its effects are most keenly felt at resolutions like 1080p, making it an ideal choice for competitive gamers.

It will concede ground where clock speeds are king, but these instances are few and far between in our experience. Plus, the AM5 motherboard you pick up to seat the 7800X3D will serve you well for a drop-in upgrade, futureproofing your build.

Read our AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D review.

Hexa-core processors may now dominate the Steam Hardware & Software Survey, but there’s still plenty of life left in quad-core chips. If you’re looking to save some cash on your next build or are looking to put together your first PC, then the Intel Core i3 13100 is a great choice.

Don’t let its budget price point fool you, as this CPU is more than capable of playing games at high refresh rates. Regardless of whether you’re someone who primarily plays demanding cinematic single-player experiences or regularly sweats it out in competitive esports, your frames per second will be well looked after.

Unlike many of the more expensive options on the list, you won’t have to fork out for one of the best CPU coolers, as Team Blue kindly includes one in the box. You shouldn’t need a costly power supply, either, as it only requires 60W to power up.

If you want to maximize your spending power with minimal fuss, look no further than the Intel Core i5 13400. Featuring six Raptor Lake cores, it’s an extremely capable processor that should help your graphics card pump out plenty of frames per second to make the most use of the best gaming monitors.

Forgoing overclocking means that you can save even more cash by opting for a less expensive chipset. You’ll also have a suitably capable stock cooler included with your purchase.

The 13400 is no slouch in creative and production applications like Photoshop and Blender either, making it an ideal choice for anyone who does more than just game with their system.

When we tested the AMD Ryzen 5 7600X, we found that the Zen 4 processor packs a potent performance punch that’s strong enough to run with the most powerful GPUs of today. This makes it a prime candidate for just about any build you could think of, regardless of size or power.

Despite sitting at the lower end of the Ryzen 7000 series stack, the 7600X handily outperforms previous generation flagships when it comes to gaming. Better still, you’re not missing out on many frames at all by opting for it versus its more expensive siblings.

It’s worth bearing in mind, however, that you’ll want to pair the 7600X with suitably strong cooling as it doesn’t come with a stock cooler. Don’t forget that you’ll need a new motherboard too, as well as some sticks of DDR5 RAM.

Read our AMD Ryzen 5 7600X review.

Grabbing a CPU with integrated graphics can be an effective stopgap while you save up for a dedicated pixel pusher, or they can be a great choice for small form factor builds. Whatever your intentions, the AMD Ryzen 5 5600G is your best bet when it comes to netting an iGPU.

Its Vega graphics cores are plenty powerful for light gaming, providing playable frame rates at 720p and 1080p resolutions at medium to low settings. Better still, the 5600G is AMD FSR compatible, which means you can easily boost fps in supported titles.

It’s no slouch of a CPU either, with most of the performance of a Ryzen 5 5600X and more with higher clock speeds. You can often find it available much lower than MSRP, but you’ll want to grab one while stocks last.

The 13700K is something of a champion for streamers and creatives alike, offering an all-in-one solution that doesn’t carry an overly premium price tag. Featuring 16 cores and 24 threads, the chip is more than capable of handling real-time 120fps encoding using the ‘x264 Slower’ preset.

This is especially useful if you have a Radeon graphics card but it can act as a great replacement for ‘NVENC’ on GeForce GPUs, should the need arise. The chip can keep up with top-tier pixel pushers too, maintaining solid maximum, average, and minimum frames per second.

It’s plenty useful for exporting and editing VODs too, boasting fast export times and rendering capabilities in Adobe suite applications such as Premiere Pro and After Effects.

Sitting at the top of Intel’s gaming CPU stack is the Core i9 14900K, one of the few chips out there capable of hitting 6.00GHz clock speeds.

It packs the usual makeup of 24 cores and 32 threads that have defined every Core i9 for the past three generations. The only other LGA 1700 processor capable of competing is the Core i9 13900KS, but the 14900K is essentially identical to the more expensive CPU.

The Core i9 14900K is best suited for systems that serve both as a gaming rig and workstation, as its strengths are best realized in multi-core workloads. Just make sure you have a capable power supply and cooler to hand, as it’ll guzzle electricity like nobody’s business.

Read our Intel Core i9 14900K review.

You’ll find the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X at the top of Team Red’s latest processor series. In this chip lies the very best that Zen 4 has to offer, with the flagship hiding some surprising tricks up its sleeve.

While this chip doesn’t boast a higher core or thread count compared to previous generation offerings, they are clocked much higher. This not only translates into higher frames per second but also greatly improves performance in just about every application that can make use of multiple CPU cores.

Its greatest trick, however, is its ‘Eco Mode’, which can force the processor to draw a maximum of 65W. Even with such low power consumption, it can still trade blows with top-tier processors. Naturally, you’ll get the most out of the chip while running at its standard 170W TDP, but it makes the prospect of a small form factor build featuring the 7950X more possibility than a dream.