Top CPUs 2023

The Athlon 200GE is a solid value, given its price point. But there are obvious trade-offs you'll have to accept after buying such an inexpensive CPU. Its biggest shortcomings are apparent in lightly-threaded workloads. Fortunately, unofficial overclocking, currently enabled on a handful of motherboards, helps improve the 200GE's benchmark results.

The Xidax X-6 gaming desktop is as malleable as you can dream, with configurations starting at $930 and ranging up to thousands of dollars. The setup we have in the lab is somewhere in between this at $2,094, and it makes short work of many hard-hitting games at 1920 x 1080 and 2560 x 1440 with its overclocked Core i7-7700K and GTX 1070. We aren't fond of a shifting inventory (a few of the components in our review unit have already be replaced) or the low total storage capacity of this particular configuration, but if you aren’t one to tinker with overclocking and want a powerful gaming PC that comes with a lifetime warranty, Xidax would provide exactly that, with as much bling and power as you want or can afford.

AMD's Ryzen 9 7900X is essentially a cut-back 7950X at a lower price. For heavy-threaded workloads (but not "32 threads" heavy), the 7900X delivers—but AMD's 7900 performs just about as well for even less.

The Intel Core i3-6100 is a good choice for a budget general-purpose PC or as a starting point for a gaming rig.

If gameplay on a budget is your main PC use, AMD's Ryzen 5 7600 is a reasonable and affordable CPU choice. With minimal cooling required, it will handle mainstream computing and gaming needs.

AMD's Ryzen 7 7700 is a respectable processor with a worthy stock cooler and fast performance, especially in games, but it can't quite topple the Intel Core i5-13600K, which matches it in price.

Its higher clock speeds give Intel's Core i9-12900KS a solid performance boost over the Core i9-12900K in some scenarios, but its steep price and hot-running tendencies hold it back.

AMD's Ryzen 5 4500 is a slightly retro CPU with one or two strikes against it due to its aging "Zen 2" architecture, but it nevertheless offers solid performance for budget buyers who own a graphics card.

AMD's Ryzen 5 5500 offers decent performance for non-gaming tasks, but it trails slightly costlier AMD and Intel CPUs in our benchmarks, making it a second-tier pick.

Upgrading to any "Comet Lake" CPU (and its new platform) has its budget implications, but for a six-core chip with gaming chops, the Core i5-10400 is as good as it gets in Intel's 10th Generation stack.