The best CPU for gaming in 2021

The best CPU for gaming doesn't need to have the most cores, the fastest clocks, the largest caches, or the most advanced architecture. The best CPU for gaming just needs to offer a great gaming experience at a price that makes sense. Simple really. 

The good news is that there are plenty of great processors out there at affordable price points right now, even more so with the Cyber Monday deals in full swing. Indeed, with the launch of Intel's 12th Gen Alder Lake family, the best processor for gaming isn't the all-singing, all-dancing halo chip at the pinnacle of Intel's lineup, but one a little further down the pecking order. You'll find the Intel Core i5 12600K newly installed at the top of our list, and for very good reason—it offers awesome gaming performance at a great price point. 

Value for money is important, if only because it means you can spend more of your budget on other things like SSDs, better motherboards, more memory, or maybe, just maybe, a better graphics card at some point—if the silicon shortage ever ends. Saving a few dollars here and there on the core components can lead to a much better overall gaming PC. That's something we can definitely get behind.

Every chip on this list has been tested through our intense CPU benchmarking suite on our PC Gamer test rig. This is made up of plenty of the latest games as well as 3D and video rendering workloads, just because we're all content creators and streamers now. Games are still the most important tests for us though, hopefully for obvious reasons. 

Make sure you check our best gaming motherboard list if you are planning to do a brand new build.

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The best CPU for gaming

Intel's 12th Gen Alder Lake processors are a vital return to form for Intel. Its underlying hybrid design was seen as a gamble when it was first announced, with its combo of performance and efficient cores not obviously bringing much to the desktop experience. It's a gamble that has unquestionably paid off though, and the gaming performance offered by Intel's latest CPUs is nothing short of incredible. 

The Core i5 12600K is the standout processor for gamers because it not only offers great gaming performance across the board, but it does so at a price point that isn't going to reduce you to tears. It not only beats the similarly priced 5600X in pretty much every game, but it outperforms the $750 Ryzen 9 5950X in plenty of tests too. That it soundly beats the Core i9 11900K is just the icing on the cake. Not bad for a $320 mid-range chip.

As this is a new platform, you will need to pick up a new motherboard and probably new memory while you're at it—Alder Lake supports DDR5 as well as DDR4. That means the initial outlay may be a bit more than you planned, but the performance is worth it, and it isn't a power-draining beast either, so you won't need an outlandish cooler to get the most from it. Throw in future-looking support for PCIe 5.0 and we have a new gaming CPU king. Long live the king.

Read our full Intel Core i5 12600K review.

That the Core i5 12600K takes the top spot is hard to argue with—awesome performance at a good price will do that—but Intel's top chip hitting the second spot may be a little more surprising. The reasoning here is that the vast majority of gamers should get the Core i5, leaving this second spot covering those that need even more performance.

If you're building a high-end PC not just for high-end, 4K gaming, but for more serious pursuits like 3D rendering and video editing, then this is the chip for you. It's a powerhouse, no question about it, but one that really needs a system built around it to make it shine—you'll need a beefy PSU to get that absolute best from it, and a serious cooler wouldn't hurt either. The fact that there is plenty of overclocking headroom will allow you to push it to a whole new level as well.

When it comes to gaming performance, this is the fastest chip out there, by a considerable margin. The problem is, you only get a few more frames per second over our top recommendation and you have to pay royally for the privelige. And even when you're buying an 'ethusiast' class CPU, you still need to have an eye on overall value for money.

Read our full Intel Core i9 12900K review.

There's very little between any of the Ryzen 5000 chips in games, which means you'll hit the same frame rates with this chip as you will the more expensive Ryzen 9 5900X. Which is incredible when you think about it—top-tier performance from the most affordable Zen 3 CPU? We'll say yes to that every single day.

This does have half the core count of the 5900X, rolling in as it does with six cores and 12 threads. However, this is only an issue with those more serious workloads, which is more than sufficient for more reasonable stuff. You could argue that gaming could go beyond the 12-threads we have here, but there's no evidence that is the case so far, and that's even though the next-gen consoles are rocking 8-cores and 16-threads. 

The Ryzen 5 5600X also bucks the Ryzen 5000 family's trend by shipping with a Wraith Stealth cooler, so you don't have to drop extra money on a third-party chiller. You don't need to, but if you do, you'll hit higher clocks for longer and also open up the wonderful world of overclocking, which could make it worthwhile. This is a decent little overclocker, and while it won't affect gaming much, it'll help in other areas nicely.

Read our full AMD Ryzen 5 5600X review.

AMD's Zen architecture has improved with each generation, but the fact that AMD managed to knock out a 19 percent IPC improvement with Zen 3 is nothing short of staggering. The key takeaway for us as gamers is that this improvement means AMD pushed Intel to improve, and improve it did with Alder Lake. 

Whatever resolution you are gaming at, this processor can handle it and keep your graphics card of choice fed with many juicy frames. The fact that this is a 12-core, 24-thread monster means that it can cope with anything else you throw at it as well. So if you have dreams of 3D rendering, video editing, or any other serious tasks, you'll know that you have the raw grunt to handle it. That it won't hold you back when gaming makes it even sweeter. 

The only real downside is the pricing and the dropping of the Wraith cooler—don't forget to factor in when you buy. You do get what you pay for, though, and this is a phenomenal chip for gaming and anything else you might want to do. 

If you're in the market for absolute power, you could step up to the Ryzen 9 5950X, which gives you 16 cores and 32 threads. However, it costs $250 more, and for gaming purposes and even most content creation chores, the 5900X is more than sufficient.

Read our full AMD Ryzen 9 5900X review.

The Core i5 11600K is my favorite chip of the new Rocket Lake generation, which marks a nostalgic return to the old days of Intel CPU launches. The top processor was always a decent halo product, but the i5 was where the price/performance metrics really sold a new generation. Okay, with the 11900K being a frustrating chip, maybe it's not a total return to the old days, but the 11600K is still an outstanding six-core, 12-thread gaming processor.

It's also affordable too, with a price tag well underneath the Ryzen 5 5600X and performance figures that have it trading blows with AMD's otherwise excellent Zen 3 chip. The Cypress Cove 14nm backport may have made it relatively power-hungry, but that doesn't stop it from being a great gaming CPU and one that delivers a lot of processor silicon for not a lot of cash.

And PCIe 4.0 support on Intel 500-series motherboards. Though that is of dubious benefit at the moment as our testing has not so far gone well with supported PCIe 4.0 SSDs. That will hopefully change, but even so, this is still one of the best cheap gaming CPUs around.

Read our full Intel Core i5 11600K review.

The Core i5 10400F is a surprisingly exciting option. It's slightly faster than the previous-gen Core i5 9400, but that F-suffix means it ditches the Intel integrated graphics completely. That's not a problem for gamers unless you want to use QuickSync, although Nvidia's NVENC is arguably better anyway. Overall, it's an excellent budget-friendly choice that doesn't cost much more than a Core i3 part.

There are other compromises, like the locked multiplier—no overclocking here. But you can save money and grab an H470 motherboard. At least you get a cooler in the box, something we'd like to see as an option with every CPU. Most boards will happily run the 10400F at 3.9GHz, so don't worry about the low base clock.

While the i5 10400F may not be as fast as other CPUs in multithreaded tests, in our gaming suite, it's tied with AMD's last-gen 3900X. Future games may start to push beyond its 6-core capabilities, but probably not before you're ready for an upgrade. Right now, the i5 10400F is plenty fast and extremely affordable.

If the Intel Core i7 11600K didn't exist, this would be an incredible chip and would have been higher up the recommendations, no sweat. It's excellent for gaming, producing the exact figures that can be seen for the 5900X and 5600X. Still, it also appears to hit the sweet spot in configuration terms, with its eight cores and 16 threads surely seeing it right for the future, seeing as that is what the Xbox Series X and Playstation 5 are rocking. 

Unfortunately for AMD, Intel does exist, and the blue company's latest Core i7 trounces this in plenty of the more critical metrics but has this chip beat in one significant way—value for money. This can be faster in some tasks, and if that's what you've got an eye on, then buy this and don't give it a second thought. But if you're mainly looking at gaming, Intel does better and costs less. And that's hard for AMD to get away from. 

Competition aside, this is still Zen 3 strutting its stuff, and it does that impressively well. Throw in the support for PCIe 4.0 as well, and this is a forward-looking chip that will last you for years.

Read our full AMD Ryzen 5 5800X review.

AMD's APUs are the best processors to drop into your rig if you're not going to use a discrete graphics card, but still want a modicum of gaming performance out of your system. And the AMD Ryzen 7 5700G is the best of the latest Zen 3 based chips to deliver that.

Unlike previous APU offerings from AMD, the Ryzen 7 5700G is far more of a jack-of-all-trades chip because we are talking about an eight-core Zen 3 CPU component with 16 threads and a powerful Vega-based GPU to back it up. That makes this a chip that's almost up there with the best of the Ryzen 5000-series CPUs in processing power, but with the graphical grunt to deliver 1080p gaming on low settings in some seriously demanding titles.

In a GPU drought, that makes the 5700G a tantalizing APU as it will get your new gaming PC up and running. At the same time, you wait for discrete graphics cards to be available and without compromising too heavily on your system performance in the meantime.

The issue is that, as the 5700G is a monolithic design rather than chiplet, there are some performance differences compared to the standard Ryzen 7 5800X, a straight eight-core, 16-thread CPU without graphics. It also lacks PCIe 4.0 support to run the fastest SSDs and demands high-speed memory to make the most of its GPU power. But it's still an excellent all-around AMD processor and a handy option when graphics cards are still so rare.

Read our AMD Ryzen 7 5700G review.

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The best CPU for gaming FAQ

AMD CPU reviews:

• AMD Ryzen 9 5950X 
• AMD Ryzen 9 5900X 
• AMD Ryzen 7 5800X 
• AMD Ryzen 7 5700G 
• AMD Ryzen 5 5600X 
• Threadripper 3970X and 3960X 
• AMD Ryzen 9 3950X 
• AMD Ryzen 9 3900XT 
• AMD Ryzen 9 3900X 
• AMD Ryzen 7 3800XT 
• AMD Ryzen 7 3700X
• AMD Ryzen 5 3600XT 
• AMD Ryzen 7 2700X 
• AMD Ryzen 7 1800X, 1700X, and 1700 
• Threadripper 1950X and 1920X 
• AMD Ryzen 5 2600X 
• AMD Ryzen 5 2400G 
• AMD Ryzen 5 1600X, 1600, 1500X, and 1500 
• AMD Ryzen 3 2200G 
• AMD Ryzen 3 1300X and 1200 

Intel CPU reviews:

• Intel Core i9 12900K
• Intel Core i5 12600K
• Intel Core i9 11900K 
• Intel Core i5 11600K
• Intel Core i5 11400F
• Intel Core i9 10980XE 
• Intel Core i9 10900K
• Intel Core i5 10600K 
• Intel Core i9 9900K 
• Intel Core i7 9700K
• Intel Core i9 7980XE 
• Intel Core i9 7960X 
• Intel Core i9 7900X 
• Intel Core i7 8700K 
• Intel Core i7 7700K and Core i5 7600K 
• Intel Core i5 8400

Jargon buster

Caching – A small segment of high-speed memory dedicated to storing and executing frequently used commands/instructions to speed up software execution. CPUs contain caches designated as Level 1, 2, and 3, with L1 being the fastest and smallest and L3 being the slowest and largest.

Core – Modern CPUs can contain anywhere from two to 70+ cores (in supercomputers), though CPUs housed in most consumer machines will generally carry between four and eight, with AMD's latest CPUs sporting up to 16 cores.

Clock speed – The speed at which a CPU can execute instructions, measured in hertz. A processor with a 3.7 GHz clock speed can process 3.7 billion instructions a second. Clock speed is one of the most critical factors for determining performance in games and workload functions.

Heat sink – A cooling solution for PCs that utilize fans or liquid cooling (active) or aluminum radiators (passive) that rely on convection to regulate a component's temperature.

Hyper-Threading (SMT) – Intel terminology for a tech that allows a processor to handle two sets of instructions 'threads' simultaneously. AMD and other CPU vendors call this SMT, Simultaneous Multi-Threading.

Socket type LGA (Land Grid Array), PGA (Pin Grid Array), or BGA (Ball Grid Array) – The way a CPU interfaces with the socket on a motherboard. LGA is used on Intel sockets with pins as part of the socket. AMD's AM4 solution, PGA, has the processors' pins, which fit into holes on the socket. AMD's Threadripper CPUs also use LGA sockets. A BGA socket is when the processor is permanently soldered to the motherboard, typically on a laptop.

TDP – Thermal design power, the maximum amount of heat a system or chip can produce that the attendant cooling system is designed to deal with under workload. This term can apply to PCs as a whole, GPUs, CPUs, or nearly any other performance component that generates heat and is in large part an indicator of how much power a part draws.

Thread – A thread refers to a series of CPU instructions for a specific program. Older CPUs and SMT disabled run one thread per core, but most modern AMD and Intel CPUs can simultaneously run two threads, sharing some resources (e.g., cache). 

Turbo Boost – Intel technology that allows processors to run at higher clock speeds under demanding loads. AMD also supports turbo or boost clocks, and we use the terms interchangeably regardless of CPU vendor.