Best CPUs (Archive)

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gasaraki

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Very weird recommendations since this Article is titled "Best Gaming CPUs". The BEST gaming cpu for $300+ is the 8700K (or 8086). The one for $200-$300 is Ryzen 2600X. $100-$200 would be the 2400G and then <$100 is 2200G.
 

robax91

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The 8700k and 8600k outperform the 2700x in games, and one is $100 cheaper than the 2700x. Are you even trying? Just change the title to AMD CPUs we want you to buy (with affiliate links).
 
Not weird at all.

The higher priced Intel CPUs only tend to handily beat the 2700x when the GPU is taken away as the limiting factor, which is rarely the case for budget limited, real world PC gaming scenarios. Heaven forbid the vast majority of buyers might consider pairing their 1050 Ti and 1060 cards with something other than Intel and see in most cases, margin of error differences! They paid less for a GPU than they could have, they may also want to pay less for a CPU than they might otherwise have. Also, a lot of these mid range buyers are doing online streaming of their gaming sessions, making the extra cores of the 2700x more valuable.

Furthermore, the AMD CPUs come with competent, usable cooling solutions, making them far more valuable than just the difference in CPU price. With the price difference saved, if the user wanted to, they may be able to step up to the next GPU tier, gaining more performance than they would have from going Intel.

The title of the article is not, Highest Frame Rate CPUs for the Money, it is Best, which is subjective, and not nearly as laser focused as to require the highest FPS generating CPUs.
 

DerekA_C

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Not sure why anyone would claim Toms as pro AMD they are absolutely pro Intel but value wise and upgradability wise AMD wins every 6 months now you need to upgrade mobo to get new CPU for intel.
 


I also though it was weird to recommend the $200 more expensive AMD CPU as the best gaming CPU. They themselves said the cheaper Intel had better single thread performance. It already has as many threads as almost any game ever uses, and it OC's better.

The reason they picked it, was for non-gaming tasks. If the title said best overall CPU, they may have a point, but they are talking about gaming CPU's. This is also the non-budget CPU recommendation, so using budget gaming as a reason is also not a good one.
 
Why do you think it's weird that a CPU not costing over $300 is not rated the best CPU in the $300 or higher category? This is neither rational nor does it fit with the premise laid out in the article, of having pricing segments, and recommending a CPU for a given price segment.
 

Fluffy_Hedgehog

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actually no, both cpus come without coolers so the price difference even with 8600K is far from 100$ - if you factor in the more expensive mainboards you actually end up pretty much on par.

unless you pair a couple of titans with the cpu or play gams at 720p and low settings, the cpu rarely is the limiting factor nowadays, so a negligible ipc-advantage does squat for your gaming experience. a bunch more cores do however keep your .1% lows in fps a lot more stable if windows or some tool you run in the background gets ideas about eating up a few cpu-cycles on the side.

yes intels chips are faster in ipc (a steadily shrinking margin though) and do clock higher on a single core. but no, that does not give them any real world advantage if paired up with realistic graphics solutions.

anyone going for an all-out gaming rig with a +1000,- $ graphics card will not need advice on what cpu to buy, anyone in the general public, is actually better served with a ryzen chip right now than with an intel one. having multi year support and upgrade paths open is just another bonus for people who do not happen to have millions at the bank.
 
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Very disappointed that this article is inflating the CPU price of the Ryzen 2700X. It is the best value at $319.00 (at Amazon and Newegg), includes a high end air cooler, and has cheaper mainboard options. All you people saying Intel 8700K is better have Too Much Money to spend. I like to get the most performance per $$$. The recommendation is correct, but the price shown would steer people to Intel. BAD ARTICLE!!!
 

Gadhar

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It still makes me shake my head that for the first time in years we have viable options for cpu's yet the fan boys still cannot let go of the whole blue vs red arguement. We should all be happy that we have the choices we currently have. I have been around since the very first pc's crawled out of the ocean and started their hostile take over. This is a good time to build a PC, excluding ram prices, and I for one cannot wait to see what is around the corner. Can't we all just get along?
 

gasaraki

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People, the title is "The Best Gaming CPU", not "The Best Gaming CPU for the Price" or the Best CPU When Paired With a Mid or Lower End Video Card or "The Best All Around CPU". The 8700K gets the highest frames in games when paired with ANY video card.
 

matthew_258

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The I5- 8600k for less then 300$ and is very stable to OC...within .01 of the top...but good cooling is important :p
 

robax91

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The i5, a Z series mobo and a 25$ ish dollar cooler will outperform a 2700x with a x470 at stock speeds (they cost within 20$ as of right now on PCPartpicker, so yea debunked your first point with a 10s google search). The gap gets bigger when overclocking, as the i5 pulls far away at higher speeds while keeping cool, and you'll have to add a new cooler for a decent OC on Ryzen (another 10s search on youtube, several benchmark comparison vids). And if you want to say costs matter too, lets factor in that Ryzen RAM is expensive, because they reply on fast memory while Intel systems can use dirt cheap ram and not suffer more than a few FPS in games. I mean your points are somewhat valid, but google search results and benchmarks are worth more than some random person's comments.

I'm not saying Ryzen isn't a good deal or platform, I'm saying that the article is clearly WRONG being titled BEST GAMING CPUS when it's clearly sponsored content and has affiliate links. BEST VALUE CPU FOR THE MONEY or BEST OVERALL CPUS FOR THE MONEY (that can game) would be better titles. In my next article mimicking this one let me write about FASTEST CARS UNDER 30k and put a Toyota Camry at #1 costing 24k and not a $25k Mustang just because the Camry is a better family car. See? Makes no sense, just change the title or the recommendation. Next thing you'll see BEST GAMING CARDS and have the vega 64 first on the list because "it can also mine!" Not fooling anyone here.
 
Okay, I'll bite! :)

· i5 8600k
· Z370 motherboard
· $25 ish cooler
$367.72

­· R7 2700x
­· x370 motherboard (x470 has zero feature benefits over x370)
$389.89

With your $25 ish cooler, you will not be able to push more than a moderate overclock on your i5.

With the 2700x, the only overclocking that makes any sense is to push the all core boost, which has negative gains in many cases as you end up capping the max frequencies lower than the already good boost clocks from the newer built in mechanism. Single threaded workloads suffer, while multi-core workloads gain.

For the extra $22.17, you get 10 more threads with the Ryzen system. Where's the value in not spending the extra money? For the sorts of overclocks people are expecting to get out of the 8600k, you will be using a 2x $25 ish (or more) cooler, defeating the cost difference, for a few extra FPS! Anybody who actually needs those extra few FPS in their game isn't likely to be buying an 8600k. I suspect they will opt for the i7.

The 8600k actually competes in the price segment that the 2600X competes in, and the 2600X pretty much ties the 2700X in general gaming performance, but for much less.

· R5 2600X
­· x370 motherboard
$289.88

For $77.84 less than the cost of the i5 system, you still come out 6 threads ahead with Ryzen.

Where is the overall better value in the 8600k? A few FPS in some games, when paired with a high end GPU and cooler!

Many gamers record and stream and have other social experiences going on, on the same PC. You may not consider the tertiary tasks a part of gaming, but a lot of people who are gaming do. How many questions pop up in the forums from folks wondering why they can't play and stream smoothly!

In the end, like everything else in life, CPUs need context, and according to gaming numbers such as the Steam hardware survey, the context most CPUs are going to find themselves gaming in is actually being paired with a GTX 1060 or lower tiered GPU, and that's going to severely limit the amount of extra FPS any Intel CPU can offer.

What's your point with the affiliate link? This isn't an argument in favor of a Tom's Hardware bias. If Tom's was basing their top CPU recommendation even remotely on how much revenue they might generate from their affiliate link, they would be better off recommending the i7, which not only costs more, but actually is selling more units on Amazon. Guess they're just silly like that.

FPS is not a strong enough argument on it's own to determine the best CPU for gaming right now as the differences in any currently meaningful context are minimal.
 

robax91

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Man this guy just doesn't get it. I kinda feel bad for him at this point, I'll just quote this little tidbit while I laugh to myself, no point in going on further after this gem.

"FPS is not a strong enough argument on it's own to determine the best CPU for gaming right now as the differences in any currently meaningful context are minimal." - Bigpinkdragon286

Lmao. Yes, yes it does. FPS is basically the only metric you can use to determine how well each CPU works with the same GPU. Your point is invalid about which GPUs you should pair with what CPU, that's not the point of the article. Also, I see you have trouble figuring out how this article works. They have price tiers, and are supposed to show the best CPU for gaming in that price tier.

"The 8600k actually competes in the price segment that the 2600X competes in, and the 2600X pretty much ties the 2700X in general gaming performance, but for much less."

Yea, again you are dodging the point to try and win the argument, something people do when they know they can't win. The $300 suggestion for the 2700x isn't justified when compared to an i7, and my point, it's not even justified when compared to an i5, which beats all of Ryzen chips (including the 2600x). Your arguments only point back to my suggestion of changing the title to "best CPUs for the money (that can game)".

The selections here aren't the best gaming CPUs, they are the best value CPUs. Period. Now move on, before you repeat yourself yet again about Ryzen being the better value, which has nothing to do with the title of the article "Best Gaming CPUs". If it's really that hard to understand, have your parents sit down and try to explain it to you, because I don't have the time for that.
 
Vitriol and condescension are not arguments and they invalidate my argument no more than they validate yours.

Sub-second frame-rate has been used by benchmarking and review sites for many years now, and while similar to FPS, strictly speaking, it's not FPS. Frametime can give a far better picture of whether a game is smooth and playable or not, whereas FPS often masks those problems. If this wasn't the case, most people would still consider multi-GPU configurations superior, despite the problems they have with jitter and frame pacing. This leads to another measure, which is frame pacing, but I don't see too many sites looking into that.

When talking about FPS, it's more useful to avoid using strictly max and min averages. Not sure exactly what you're referring to as you just blurt out FPS, but 99th percentile, 1%, and 0.1% are better metrics than just raw max and min averages.

A perfect example is the old G3258 vs X4 760k. The G3258 would spit out higher FPS, but return an overall worse user experience due to it's inability to maintain a consistently fluid experience.

Consistent delivery of frames can be just as important to the fluidity of motion in games, if not more, as how many frames you're getting.

I'm not suggesting which GPUs you should pair with what CPU, never was. I had some rhetoric in one of my replies, maybe you mean that? I also pointed out the most common GPU according to a common hardware survey, taken by many gamers the world over.

CPUs for gaming don't exist in a vacuum. It just so happens that you can't game on a CPU without a graphics device, and it just so happens that, according to the numbers, most of the graphics devices in use around the world are going to limit the FPS you can achieve with either a 2600X, 8600k, 2700X, and even an 8086k, meaning that once you are FPS limited by the GPU, you will want another metric for deciding which CPU to purchase within the pricing tiers.

If you're going to make general assertions rather than point out specific instances where I am wrong, I'm going to ignore what you're saying.

You're the one that began comparing across price tiers, declaring a CPU from the $200 - $300 tier was better and cheaper than one from the $300+ tier. I just fleshed out your argument with actual numbers, and added the 2600X, since it actually occupies the $200 - $300 tier with the 8600k. My comparison of CPUs within a tier goes along with the premise of the article. Your comparison across tiers doesn't.

I'm dodging your point?

Maybe your point isn't clear?

I'm not even sure the point you're trying to get across when you say "The $300 suggestion for the 2700x isn't justified when compared to an i7...".

You can't game in any fashion where frame times are a meaningful measurement without a graphics device, therefore you can't have a best gaming comparison without some modicum of graphics device. You have to imply some sort of GPU in a best gaming decision.

Graphics devices impose limits on the number of frames you can output from a CPU in a given time frame based on the performance of the graphics device.

Because a graphics device must be implied, and that implied graphics device must have a particular performance level, a decision must be made as to what performance level to use.

If only 4% or less of GPUs currently being used are capable of demonstrating your FPS difference in a meaningful way, logically speaking, those probably aren't the right GPUs to be using the performance of when recommending CPUs for most people.

If you advocate for using the high end GPUs with market penetration below 4% to measure with, what is the reasoning there, to remove the GPU as the bottleneck? Once you remove the GPU as a bottleneck, you have reverted back to the best CPU comparison, the comparison without the gaming part.

If over 50% of the GPUs in use for gaming on a service such as Steam are at a GTX 1060 level or below, then that seems a much more logical performance level for the graphics device.

Once you normalize the FPS generated across differing CPUs by means of a GPU bottleneck, you have to look at other reasons to recommend a CPU, such as value.

Have a nice day.
 

Darkwing Duck

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How come the Alternative Picks are only clickable for external / Amazon sites.
I wish they would also have their own individual "Read the full review".
For example,
 
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