CPU Comparison

Gaming CPUs by price bracket

The fastest CPU for gaming at a given budget is rarely the one with the most cores. The table below reads the current catalog and picks two chips per bracket: the one with the highest BerkScore, and the one that buys the most BerkScore per dollar. They update with every rebuild of the table.

Leave room in the budget for what the chip needs: a motherboard for its socket, the right memory and, for most fast chips, a cooler. Or skip the build: the gaming PCs table prices every prebuilt against these same chips bought separately.

Under $150$150 to $300$300 to $500

AMD and Intel side by side

Both make fast processors; they get there differently. AMD Ryzen chips use chiplets and, in the X3D models, a stacked block of cache that games love. Intel mixes performance cores and efficiency cores on one die, with a large shared cache and high clocks.

For a gaming build, the X3D chips lead the BerkScore column. For video editing and other work that uses every core, Intel's high core counts and AMD's Ryzen 9 chips trade places depending on the price that day, which is what the per-dollar column is for.

AMD CPUsIntel CPUs3D V-Cache

Best performance per dollar right now

This is the column nobody else has. PassMark publishes benchmark scores next to prices that lag behind the market. Tom's Hardware publishes a frame-rate hierarchy with no prices at all. This table divides the BerkScore by today's Amazon price and sorts by it. That is the whole page in one column.

The five chips above are the in-stock leaders of the current table. Prices move every week, and so does this list.

In stock onlyBest value with 3D V-Cache

How the BerkScore is calculated

The BerkScore is published in full so anyone can recompute it. Every component comes from data we hold directly: the core and thread count, the boost clock, the L3 cache, whether the chip has 3D V-Cache, its TDP as an efficiency penalty, and its architecture generation. Each spec is taken from AMD's and Intel's official spec sheets and cross-checked against the Amazon listing; a mismatch holds the row back for review.

BerkScore = 4.79 × log2(cores) + 1.00 × log2(threads) + 3.00 × boost GHz + 9.48 × log2(effective L3 MB) − 8.15 if two AMD chiplets − 2.00 × TDP/100 W + architecture constant

Effective L3 is the cache one game actually sees. On Intel it is the whole L3. On AMD each chiplet has its own 32 MB, so a standard Ryzen counts at most 32 MB and an X3D chip counts 96 MB, however many chiplets it has.

Last calibration: October 14, 2026.

Calibration. The weights were fitted once against the 1080p gaming column of a public CPU hierarchy (Tom's Hardware, 30 current processors), so that the ordering matches known real-world results. They were then frozen. They are not re-tuned for any product, and they change only when a new architecture generation ships. Zen 3 has no chip in that reference set, so its constant is extrapolated one step below Zen 4.

This is a derived index built from specifications, not a copy of anyone else's benchmark scores. It predicts gaming performance with a GPU that is not the bottleneck; at 4K, most of these chips land closer together.

Why L3 cache beats core count for games

Games are latency-bound, not core-bound. Each frame, the game engine walks through the same world data again and again; whatever fits in the L3 cache is read in a few nanoseconds, and whatever does not has to come from RAM, many times slower. That is why an 8-core chip with 96 MB of L3 beats a 16-core chip with 32 MB in most titles.

Resolution changes how much this matters. At 4K the graphics card sets the pace and most CPUs look alike; at 1440p, the CPU weighs far more on frame rate than at 4K, especially on high refresh screens. If you are pairing a new processor with one of our 1440p monitors, the L3 column is the one to read first.

Over 64 MB of L332 to 64 MB

Check your socket before you buy

The number one reason processors come back is a board that cannot run them. Check the socket first, then whether the board needs a BIOS update before the new chip will boot.

Boards often sit in warehouses for months, so a new box can ship with a BIOS too old to boot the newest chips. If yours has a BIOS Flashback button, you can update it from a USB stick with no processor installed. If it does not, you need an older compatible CPU to flash it first, or a board that states support for your chip out of the box.

AM4AM5LGA 1700LGA 1851