Pick the Right 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. (At CES 2025, Nvidia and AMD announced their next-gen processors, the RTX 5090 and AMD RX 9070.) 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.

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.

AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D – Photos