Are you planning on Desk PC Build this year then you're gonna have to choose between intel or amd. Now both of these companies of course produce the cpu or the brain of your gaming computer. The processor is used in pretty much every operation that your pc makes regardless of whether that's pwning noobs and Fortnite's logging into windows or even just downloading games from steam for pc gamers. This choice is really important as your in-game frame rate or how smooth the gameplay will feel is actually dictated not only by your graphics card but the processor as well.
So you might find that you get a brand new shiny gpu you slot it in your system. It's not actually able to work to its full potential because your processor is holding it back and this would hurt a lot. So in this article I'm going to go through absolutely everything that you need to know about the processor. which choice you should make intel amd and more specifically what you need to do to make sure you're making it the right decision for you. But first a quick word from this article sponsor core says 5000 series is about to change your gaming pc forever with room for all of the latest and greatest components. You can easily fit and call ginormous graphics cards with ease step up your game with corsair's air guide fan technology and with support for a whopping 10 case fans.
You can always Desk PC Build that's right for you you can even choose between glass and mesh panels the possibilities really are endless check out the corsair 5000 series today. Get ready for a world of fun fun fun. Now to be fair the performance games that we've seen over the last few years have been absolutely incredible in this space. We do owe amd a great deal of gratitude for pushing pc gaming forwards. you see up until 2017 intel had been constantly pumping out quad-core consumer cpus with no real intention of innovating in the space. now, sure the chips were getting more and more powerful every year but it was hardly revolutionary everything changed in march 2017 though, when amd released the ryzen range to the world a series of eight-core chips. They've actually priced around about the same as intel's quad core ones and it was a big deal as you might expect they were an immediate hit but were absolutely far from perfect single core performance lagged a fair away from intel and launch issues with memory and stability.
Meant that an intel gaming pc was probably still the best way to go for most intel started a counter with their own higher core count cpus and they launched their own eight core gaming cpu in 2018. But with higher prices power consumption and an ever-improving competitor the battle for the best gaming cpu finally changed hands at the end of 2020 with a launch of ryzen 5000. The ryzen 5000 series chips are honestly incredible they come in a wide range of core counts you've got 16 12 8 6 and soon to be four core variants but the thing that made these so stand out especially versus intel was that this is the first time that uh offering from amd actually had better gaming performance out of the box than an intel chip. And this was a big deal.
It is a big deal we've still got these, these are current this is all down to their super strong single core performance and if you're new to pc gaming the way that video games are coded means that a game typically will work better on fewer faster cores rather than just having a higher amount of slower cores. For example, a much more expensive 64 core thread ripper chip is actually a fair bit worse in gaming than the much cheaper 6 core ryzen 5 5600x. This is because performance in games doesn't really scale the number of cpu cores instead for a better gauge of gaming performance. You should be looking at the clock speeds that each processor core will be running at0 if you do want to learn a little bit more about how many cores you do actually need for gaming what the best number for you is you have actually research more to find it and honestly the results are fascinating cpus have what's known as their base clock in addition to their boost clock.
These are dynamic and will take care of themselves for you though if you manually overclock a chip you can override these if you're that way inclined but the base clock is the speed that the chip should be able to run at consistently whilst the boost clocks are speeds that can be met assuming. You have a good cooler attached to keep the thermals in check. Now I know at this stage it probably is starting to sound a little bit technical and a bit complicated but the good news is honestly you don't really need to worry about this at all.
There's a much easier way of getting the information in a fully digestible and more meaningful way and that is just to google, the name of your chosen cpu followed by its single core performance to get an idea of how strong it is for gaming. But what does that even mean strong for gaming that sounds a bit wishy-washy right well as alluded to earlier your in-game frame rate is determined by both your graphics card and your computer processor so you can spend over a grand on an rtx 3090 but if you pair it with a 70 pound core a3 you're definitely going to run into problems. The simple way of looking at it is that both your gpu and cpu will have a maximum frame rate that they can pump out individually and whichever one is lower is what you will get delivered to the display and then enjoyed by you the crafty little pc gamer. That I know you are in the real world things are a little bit more complicated as different parts of a game require differing amounts of resources.
Let's say a huge explosion goes off as you enter a new area that is pretty hard on the cpu or perhaps three highly detailed characters enter the scene to fight. A very hairy bear probably not the description the witcher 3 would put on the back of the box but I think it's pretty apt. this would be almost entirely gpu dependent not only this but different games also have different requirements. Apex legends for instance is a lot easier on the cpu than cyberpunk 2077 oh well done, well done another boring pc centric article. just tell me which one to buy for goodness sake amd or intel firstly how rude secondly I'm getting to it. Alright you need to make 2021 should be a great year for cpus as intel and amd essentially offer the exact same thing which are 8 6 and 4 core gaming cpus all with very similar single and multi-core performance.
This performance is leaps and bounds ahead of what was on offer in 2017. so if you have had your pc for a fair few years now it is a fabulous time to upgrade further to this both intel and amd. now offer b series motherboards and these are perfect for gamers with support for both pcie generation 4 graphics cards and ssds and prices that are actually a fair bit lower than their higher-end offerings for intel. you're after a b560 motherboard while on amd it's b550 team red's b550 is a little bit more expensive but intel's b560 doesn't actually support cpu overclocking. So they do kind of balance each other out but what is the best gaming cpu exactly and specifically which one should I buy? well, best doesn't always mean the top performing i'd argue that for pc gamers it's the best value chip that offers all the performance that you need in games. Remember when I said that different games have different loads and cpus have a theoretical maximum frame rate every penny that you spend on a processor is a penny that you then don't have for a shiny new graphics card.
So sure the top end ryzen 5800x and intel 11900k are absolute eight core beasts but do you actually need one because unless you're playing at super high refresh rates on some ridiculously high end setup, really big graphics card then this performance is essentially performance you can't tap into anyway. yes you've got a fantastic cpu but if your graphics card is holding you back then maybe your money should have gone. there instead most pc gamers should probably look at something a little bit lower down the stack with my current favorite gaming cpu being the ryzen 5 5600x as. This is an absolute beast of a cpu the beauty of this chip is that the single core performance is essentially the same as the ryzen 7 and ryzen 9s.
So the real world frame rate that you'll be guessing is actually going to be pretty much the exact same in the vast majority of titles. I can absolutely understand that longevity is a big reason to spend more on a component and if you can spend the extra then it may well be worth it to do so. But don't actively take money away from your graphics cards just to turn a 6 core cpu into an 8 core because it isn't necessarily going to help you in fact it may well do the opposite. There is actually a big fat exception to this rule though and that is multi-tasking. what if you want to use your pc for other things than gaming and what if you want to do a load of things at the same time as gaming. This is where having more cores will definitely come in handy with things like game streaming being a very obvious application but there are loads of lesser applications that can also add up too. For example, alt tabbing into discord this won't be an issue but what about running a game in boardless window mode downloading updates browsing the web and watching a twitch stream all at the same time. some headroom would be nice no you really need to think about yourself as an individual and consider what you're going to have in your gaming computer. Then what you're going to use it for rather than listening to all of the noise that you get online about how intel sucks or amd is too expensive with essentially the exact same feature set core count and performance on offer with the 11th gen cpus from intel and the 5000 series from amd.
it doesn't really matter which brand you buy this time as the differences between the two while they will exist are very subtle. just work out how many cores you think you need as step number one and this will probably land you on four six or eight. then you can look at the exact chips from intel and amd and then compare the performance benchmark numbers from people like myself good old pc centric. the key thing that you need to think about is price, price to performance how much performance do you need? how much is it going to cost you and the subtlety is that it's not just the price of the processor itself. it's also the price of the motherboard. so add them up together and then see what comes out best for you. Yes absolutely motherboards are quite complicated beasts.
It is down to you, I don't think you can really make the wrong decision this time around just hang on to those prices and do check the benchmarks. just to make sure that the chip that you're buying is going to be suitable for what you want to play. I think it's uh i think it's a good time to be a pc gamer unless you want to buy a graphics card.
