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. Whatever resolution you are gaming at, this processor can handle it and keep your graphics card of choice fed with many juicy frames. Honestly, there's so little between these two now that anyone claiming otherwise is delusional. The key takeaway for us as gamers is that this improvement means that AMD can now stand toe to toe with Intel when it comes to gaming. Make sure you check our best gaming motherboard list if you are planning to do a brand new build.ĪMD'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.

Unless you're desperate for the awkward PCIe 4.0 solution, the latest Intel chips offer, go with either a Z490 or cheaper B460 motherboard at this point for Intel. Whereas Intel's Comet Lake chips use the LGA 1200 socket, Rocket Lake has introduced new 500-series boards. The new Ryzen 5000 CPUs, for example, still use the AM4 socket and are only compatible with X570, B550, and A520 motherboards (oh, and B450 and X470 motherboards). In building a new PC from scratch, you have to know if it's an Intel or AMD system you're going for-that'll dictate compatibility. The release of Intel's Rocket Lake chips means we've got a bunch of CPUs of varying quality, with its flagship Core i9 11900K being a bit of an expensive letdown whereas the less powerful Core i5 11600K is the best value we've seen for Intel CPUs. Right now, our favorite CPU is the Ryzen 9 5900X, along with much of AMD's current impressive Zen 3 chips, which give you the best performance and pricing combined.

This includes 3D and video rendering workloads as well and, most importantly, gaming performance. New Windows 11 devices must use modern device drivers which have passed the Windows Hardware Compatibility Program for Windows 11 or the latest available modern device drivers based on Declarative, Componentized, Hardware Support Apps (DCH) design principles.Every chip on this list has been tested through our intense CPU benchmarking suite on our PC Gamer test rig. OEMs may use the following CPUs for new Windows 11 devices.

Core m7 vs core i5