When it comes down to the best processors, the competition never really stops. This is even evident with AMD Ryzen, only a few months ago it was praised by everyone around for finally giving Intel some much-needed competition, but just a few months later they’re being challenged by Intel’s 8th-generation Coffee Lake CPUs, which now boast more cores and threads than their 7th-generation Kaby Lake predecessors.
As the best processor game continuously ramps up and gets more heated, however, pricing and availability start to complicate things a bit. If you’re going strictly by MSRP, for instance, Intel would hands down be offering a better price to performance ratio than their competition with their coffee lake processors – you won’t be able to find one that hasn’t had the price hiked to a ridiculous degree by retailers.
- In the ever present war of AMD vs Intel, who triumphs?
Luckily, if you need a CPU now, and you don’t want to go down the rabbit hole of availability and outlandish prices, there are plenty of still-good 7th-generation Intel Kaby Lake and AMD Ryzen CPUs that are going to be a lot easier to find. Whatever you choose, though, you’ll need to make sure that you have the best motherboard for whichever CPU you decide on, or you could find yourself with a very expensive paperweight. Just remember, AM4 is AMD and Z270 is Kaby Lake. And if you’re looking to overclock, make sure you pick up one of the best CPU coolers.
To further complicate things on the brand-new processor front, Intel’s Coffee Lake processors require their own distinct chipset even though they have a similar socket to Kaby Lake processors. It’s complicated, but just keep in mind that if you do go for an 8th generation Intel CPU, you’ll need to buy a Z370 board.
Don’t let any of that discourage you though, we’ve culled through two generations of Intel CPUs and AMD’s new Ryzen line to find only the best processors on the market.
Whether AMD Ryzen, Intel Kaby Lake or Coffee Lake, our top picks are listed below:
During the Coffee Lake-S launch, Intel claimed that it’d be giving us its best gaming processor ever; they weren’t wrong. This ’K’ series chip decimates AMD’s flagship in almost every way possible. Abandoning the company’s invisible rule to keep processors sporting over four cores out of the hands of the mainstream, the i7-8700K makes hexa-core the new vogue.
Read our full review: Intel Core i7-8700K
When AMD released its Zen architecture-based Ryzen chips back in June, they relied on the promise of a price-to-performance ratio that finally knock Intel off of their untouchable throne. Simultaneously, however, they fell quite short of Intel in terms of raw horsepower. That all changed overnight with the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X, a chunk of silicon that’s not only a better value than Intel’s Core i9-7900X, but it’s also easier to anchor into the socket of any x399 motherboard.
Read the full review: AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that with its mid-range chip, AMD offers more cores for less money when compared to Intel. While in year’s past this has equated to making compromises in other areas to keep the costs low, the Ryzen 5 1600X remains economical without being shown up. After all, operating with six cores and 12 threads, there’s no shame in a 3.6GHz base frequency, not to mention the 4.0GHz boost in addition to overclocking capabilities.
Read the full review: AMD Ryzen 5 1600X
Many people will assume that because it requires discrete GPU to use, the AMD Ryzen 3 1300X is built solely for gaming. Once you drop your assumptions, though, you’ll see it as the little processor that could. That’s because, at a price that’s the definition of reasonable, you’re getting a chip that’s 53% faster at encoding video than the Intel Core i3-7350K in Handbrake and – with the right GPU attached – can easily help you attain 60 frames per second in Overwatch.
Read the full review: AMD Ryzen 3 1300X
Like the 7700K that preceded it on this list, the Intel Core i5-7600K is an unlocked, overclockable quad-core processor from Intel. However, it also suffers from the same integral shortcoming; that is that it’s barely an upgrade over the i5-6600K. Be that as it may, squeezing out only 300MHz over its precursor brings it nearly in line with the last-gen Core i7-6700K when overclocked. All the while, it won’t put too much of a dent in your budget either.
The primary contender to Intel’s Core i7-7700K, the AMD Ryzen 7 1800X poses a convincing threat to Intel’s flagship. While it’s unfortunately more expensive than the 7700K, uncharacteristic for the oft value-focused Red Team, the Ryzen 7 1800X most certainly keeps up with some of Intel’s older chips. Plus, unlike the Core i7-5960X and -6700K it most intimately rivals, the AMD Ryzen 7 1800X is much more qualified for VR now and into the future.
Read the full review: AMD Ryzen 7 1800X
The naming convention is confusing, given that the Intel Core i7-7820X is part of Intel’s “Skylake-X” series rather than the X-class chips built on the 14nm Kaby Lake node, but semantics matter very little when you get to go hands-on with an Intel CPU boasting this many cores. Although the fact that you’ll need a new motherboard to use this octa-core monster might be enough to scare some users off to Ryzen, Intel loyalists shan’t mind the upgrade.
Intel's 18-core processor is all about brute force. With the ability to kick up all of its cores to 4.8GHz (by our testing at least), this monstrous CPU brings performance to a new level of insanity. The only caveats are this processor power draw and price are equally beastly.
Read the full review: Intel Core i9-7980XE
With the amount of money you’ll save by purchasing the Intel Pentium G4560 over a Core i3 chip, we promise you won’t mind the ever-so-slight loss in performance you can expect from this hardy value chip. As the first Pentium processor in quite some time to feature hyper-threading, the G4560 goes out of its way to show us all what we’ve been missing. And, in benchmarks, it proves itself eerily adjacent to the more expensive Intel Core i3-7100.
Maybe you’ve probably heard some bad things about the AMD A12-9800, some of which are justified, but some salty impressions we’ve seen are just based on how AMD’s first AM4-compatible APUs aren’t Zen-based. Instead, the A12-9800 takes advantage of the Bristol Ridge architecture, which is basically just a refresh of the Bulldozer family AMD has been slowly iterating on since 2011. Even so, this is the best way single AMD chip build independent of a discrete GPU – for now.
- Ready to up the ante on your display? The best monitor is here
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