Once you've made those investments, you're oftentimes better off just getting a faster CPU in the first place.That said, if you want to give it a go, know your overclockables!
Threadripper?
It's possible to objectively measure CPU performance across a range of applications and usage cases, and if you're not bound by mere-mortal concerns such as a budget, it's easy enough to get a pretty good idea of what "best" means. The third-gen chips and boards support the same lanes, but third-gen chips work only with third-gen boards and vice versa.Note that Threadripper chips, due to their huge dies, require special coolers or brackets—many existing coolers won't work with TR4 or sTRX4—and most Threadripper cooling solutions are liquid-cooled.
One thing to note: Two of the early Core X-Series CPUs, under the "Kaby Lake-X" banner, were stripped-down chips with limited PCI Express lane support and modest core/thread counts. For our recommendation, we stay on integrated graphics, which puts AMD’s APUs in line for consideration. Which of the two big chip makers should you go with: AMD, or Intel? AMD Ryzen 5 3600X: The best mid-range CPU for gaming and everything else.
Expect to pay roughly $150 to $200, possibly a bit less if you opt for a previous-gen chip. TDP is relevant as a yardstick for the heat output that the cooler will have to handle. In gaming, something like Grand Theft Auto 5 at 1080p, we saw the Core i5-10600K(F) and the AMD Ryzen 7 3700X on par with average frame rates, and the 3700X slightly ahead by a low single digit percentage on 95th percentiles.As we move down into more casual PC gaming territory, it has historically been difficult to recommend a good CPU at this price: naturally a lot of money will end up on graphics here, meaning that CPU+GPU could easily account for 60% of the total build cost.
We’re still waiting to see Intel’s 10nm in any form other than notebooks, either in the form of server parts (Ice Lake Xeon, Our big CPU reviews for the last 12 months have covered all the launches so far, and are well worth a read. These "lanes" are the internal electrical data pathways employed by video cards, PCI Express SSDs, and other PCI Express-bound internal cards. Our tips and picks below will help you choose the best CPU for gaming. There are edge cases on every line.
In that case, we have to make sure that the CPU can still take a good graphics card at high refresh rates or larger resolutions.For this, we’ve chosen the most popular AMD processor which fits nicely into this bracket: the Ryzen 5 3600 may be at the low-end of AMD’s mainstream Zen 2 offerings, but it performs really well for having six cores for $155.