The best CPUs on the market, compared

Find the right silicon for your gaming PC.

Whether you’re building your PC from scratch, or ordering one from a rig builder, you’ve got a big decision to make about the processor.

Choosing the right one can be just as important as choosing the right graphics card. Without a processor capable of feeding data to that card fast enough, you’re wasting a lot of the GPU performance you’ve paid for. The choice of processor will also have a hefty impact on the final price of your build.

Which processor manufacturer do I go for, AMD or Intel?

In the two-horse race of the graphics card market it’s become almost a personal choice as to whether you go for AMD or Nvidia. In the CPU market things are a little more cut and dried: if you want the best processor then you buy an Intel.

But because everyone’s doing that, Intel’s processors are generally a lot more expensive than AMD’s. If money is tight, an AMD processor is still a viable option.

How many cores do I need?

For the vast majority of the things you do with your PC, especially gaming, the now-standard quadcore setup is more than enough. The difficulty is that not all quad-core processors were created equal. Intel’s i7 and i5 chips are both quad-core, but the i7 has HyperThreading, which effectively doubles the processing threads for each core.

All current AMD processors work on a similar basis. They operate with separate modules, each with two basic cores and some shared silicon.

That’s all rather confusing— thanks AMD and Intel—but happily, gamers only have to worry about one thing: good singlethreaded performance. Most current game engines will run faster on a chip with speedy individual threads than a slower one with more cores.

Should I overclock my CPU?

I don’t overclock mine, but that’s because I’m fortunate enough to have a machine with a decent processor, so GPU bottlenecking isn’t an issue. However, if you’re finding the performance in your games isn’t what you want it to be, overclocking your CPU can be a way of getting a little extra push. If your expensive graphics card is currently underperforming, boosting the clockspeed might deliver the graphical performance you paid for.

If your CPU isn’t bottlenecking your graphics card, however, boosting the clocks probably won’t raise overall framerates. Even then, it can still be a great way of upping the minimum framerates to deliver smoother performance.

Isn’t it harmful to my hardware?

It can be, but thankfully today’s processors and motherboards are very much designed with overclocking in mind. Your machine is likely to shut down well before there’s any chance of doing damage to your expensive silicon. It’s worth taking precautions though, so a decent CPU cooler is important, as is monitoring those temperatures when you’re setting your overclock. Your PC may be running at your new clockspeed, but if it’s constantly operating at 93ºC it’s not going to be happy for long.