A great gaming PC depends first and foremost on a powerful graphics card. The graphics card handles all the lovely shaders, detailed textures and complex polygons of modern gaming and ensures it bobs along at a smooth frame rate. But to keep the graphics card fed with data, you’ll also need a high performance CPU. And of course, games are more than just graphics—elements like AI and networking code running on the CPU.But what is the best CPU for a gaming PC? For the vast majority of games, features like additional CPU cores and hyper-threading make little difference to performance. They certainly affect non-gaming tasks like video encoding or applying filters in Photoshop, but they have a bigger impact on price than frames per second.We’ve considered this when choosing the best CPUs for PC gaming. We’re not going to recommend the most expensive, high-end Extreme Edition CPU. Sure, it’s the most powerful—but it’s also way more money than you need to spend. And those extra cores and that extra power don’t make a CPU like the $1050 Intel i7 5960X particularly better at gaming than a more mainstream model. Budgetary requirements are a major factor, as you’ll usually get better gaming performance from your PC by choosing a middle-of-the-road CPU and putting the saving into purchasing a better graphics card.For this reason, our absolute favorite gaming CPU is Intel’s Core i5-4690K, since it’s the perfect balance of value and performance. It usually retails for less than $250 on Amazon and it carries some excellent specifications—it’s a quad-core processor that runs at 3.5 GHz, which means it’s more than capable of driving any graphics card it’s paired with, and never drags down gaming performance. You can even overclock it to well over 4 GHz to get even more performance.The i5-4690K is the best CPU for most rigs, but we know some PC gamers are building on a budget, or want more performance out of the gate without overclocking. We have recommendations for both more affordable and more powerful CPUs on the following pages. By carefully choosing the right CPU and pairing it with the right graphics card, you can buy a rig on a tight budget and still enjoy great performance in all modern games. You can buy an affordable CPU that can be easily overclocked to offer performance that rivals more expensive models.And if you really do want to squeeze every last ounce of gaming performance out of your PC, we’ll recommend the best CPU for the job, and explain exactly what makes it so good for a gaming PC.
Intel Core i7
Intel Core i5
Testing processorsGenerally speaking, gaming performance is affected by multiple aspects of your computer’s CPU. Its technical efficiency is probably the biggest, as in how good it is at number crunching. A highly efficient processor running at just 2 GHz can easily outperform a less efficient processor running at a higher clock speed.A great example is the Pentium 4 from ten years ago, which was easily beaten by AMD’s Athlon chips in gaming benchmarks, due its less efficient Netburst architecture. But given two CPUs based on the same architecture, the one that runs at a faster clock speed will nearly always win. Some games, but not all, will make use of multiple CPU cores and it’s also important to have a good amount of cache (per core) to ensure memory performance remains strong.It does depend on the individual game though, how it’s designed and coded. Some games will really benefit from a faster CPU, while others will see little difference, as they’re almost entirely reliant on the power of your GPU. For reference, here are a few late 2014 recommended game specs:
· Far Cry 4: 2.5GHz i5-2400S processor
· Civilization: Beyond Earth: 1.8GHz quad core processor
· Dragon Age: Inquisition: 3.0 GHz quad core processor
All the processors were tested in a PC with an Asus Z87 Pro motherboard, with 16GB of 1600 MHz Crucial DDR3 memory, running Windows 8.1 on a SanDisk Extreme Pro SSD. This specification represents a fairly high-end modern gaming PC. It had an Nvidia GeForce GTX 970, a highly capable graphics card that can really drive 3D performance.We first used some quick-and-easy synthetic tests, including Geekbench and Unigine Heaven 4.0. Geekbench is a suite of CPU tests that measures processor speed when performing a variety of calculations that are likely to be used in day-to-day use of an operating system. It provides a score for performance when running a single process, which is akin to its raw speed, and another for multi-threaded software, which benefits greatly from additional CPU cores.The real beauty of Geekbench is that its cross platform, so can be used to compare the relative performance of a tablet, phone and PC, across Windows, Android, OS X and iOS. Unigine Heaven is more gaming focused, as it draws a number of 3D scenes that look very much like a fantasy game. It calculates framerate and provides a score at the end.We also ran a video encode of a three-hour long 1080p video, using Handbrake at its
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