The Best Processors from Intel and AMD for Your PC

If you are looking to buy a new CPU to have a more powerful PC, it is most likely that you have lost yourself among a huge collection of Intel and AMD models among those that are available in the market, that is why we have thought about making one list of what we consider to be the best CPU you can buy right now.

Our selection criteria

The huge range of CPUs from Intel and AMD makes it difficult to choose a CPU in each category without first doing a general screening of all of them. That is why we have decided to carry out a selection scale, which first consists of a series of elimination criteria to discard a large number of CPUs included in the market.

• The first elimination criterion is the number of cores, today a 4-core configuration is insufficient for the future, so all Intel and AMD CPUs that have a 4-core configuration have been discarded. In the same way, most applications do not take advantage of the capacity of a CPU beyond 8 cores, so all CPUs that exceed that figure have been discarded from our comparison.
• The second criterion is the selection of the generations of the different CPUs. On the one hand we have reduced the Ryzen 5000 by AMD, while in the case of Intel we have chosen the eleventh generation by Intel with the exception of the Core i9-10900F as there is no CPU with more than eight tenth cores. generation.
• The third selection criterion is based on discarding those CPU models that are part of the OEM world and therefore cannot be purchased separately in conventional distribution chains as of the day of writing the article.

Once we have marked the selection criteria, let’s see which are the best Intel and AMD CPUs of the moment. That is why we have separated the selection into several different sections according to the number of cores of each processor.

The best 6-core CPUs from Intel and AMD

The first turn is that of the CPUs with six cores in total, of which we have selected three representatives to compete with each other. On the Intel side we have their Intel Core i5-11600K based on the Rocket Lake architecture and the Intel Core i5-11400F based on the same architecture, while on the AMD side we have chosen the AMD Ryzen 5 5600X.

Intel Core i5-11400F

The reason why we have chosen this CPU is for its excellent value for money, since we can find it in most places for less than 200 euros. It is a six-core, 12-thread CPU that starts from a base clock speed of 2.6 GHz but increases to 4.4 GHz when placed in turbo mode.

Its excellent relationship between its power and its price make it ideal for those who want to build a Gaming PC or a professional workstation for a very low price. Its only limitation? The fact of not bringing an integrated graphics card with it, but it is something that is forgiven since it is an ideal CPU if you want a gamer PC to play Full HD or Quad HD if you pair it with a good graphics card.

AMD Ryzen 5 5600X CPU

The six-core option from AMD is based on the Zen 3 architecture, it is a powerful CPU with a base speed of 3.7 GHz. It can reach 4.6 GHz as a maximum clock speed. Being part of the family of AMD Vermeer CPUs, built by chiplets, this CPU does not include an integrated GPU inside and therefore we require one, something that will be common for all AMD CPUs in the comparison.

The AMD Ryzen 5600X has an advantage over its direct rival in the same price range, the Intel Core i5-11600K and that is the fact that it is built on a more advanced manufacturing node, 7nm TSMC vs 14nm Intel. What makes the TDP of this processor 65 W, so it is a section that seems important to you when choosing a CPU then the Ryzen 5600X is the best option for you.

Intel Core i5-11600K CPU

The third of the six-core CPUs that we have chosen is the Intel Core-i5 11600K, a CPU that after all is a version with a 125W TDP of the Core i5-11400F that also has an integrated GPU, although its limited power will not allow you to play high caliber games.

Its base clock speed is 3.9 GHz with the ability to reach 4.9 GHz in turbo mode, so it has a higher performance than the i5-11400F, so if you are looking for a 6-core Intel CPU and you have the enough money we recommend this over the Core i5-11400F.

Compared to the Ryzen 5 5600X, they are two CPUs that are fully matched in the vast majority of games, with differences in games.

The best 8-core CPUs from Intel and AMD

8-core CPUs belong to the upper-middle range of processors for PCs, so obviously in the price range they are higher than six-core CPUs, but they are ideal for gaming, since most games in they are currently optimized for this number of cores and therefore you are going to see a considerable improvement in games compared to six cores.

They are therefore the options that you will have to choose if you want to have a gaming PC to play at Quad HD and 4K resolutions. And therefore the ideal pairs for high-end graphics cards from AMD and NVIDIA, as a six-core configuration can put an RTX 3080 or RX 6800 XT in a performance bottleneck in games. more pointers.

Our selection? In this case we have selected only 2 CPUs, on the one hand the Intel Core i7-11700K and on the other the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X. Which are even in terms of performance and time, to the point where in some games the Intel model wins and in others the AMD model.

Intel Core i7-11700K CPU

The Intel Core i7-11700K like the rest of Intel CPUs that we have covered in this list is based on Intel’s Rocket Lake architecture. We have chosen the i7-11700K model over the other 8-core models due to the fact that it has the best power-to-price ratio of all.

It is true that the 11900K is in figures a much better processor, the 11700K is usually 200 euros cheaper, which gives us to be able to get a much better equipment around it and therefore we are talking about better performance for the same price .

We are facing a CPU whose base clock speed is 3.6 GHz, but with the ability to reach 5 GHz as the maximum speed. Its TDP is 125 W, but it has a lower consumption mode that puts the base clock speed at 3.1 GHz and reduces consumption to 95 W.

AMD Ryzen 7 5800X CPU

The representative of the 8-core architecture by AMD is the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X, which like the AMD Ryzen 5600X that we have discussed before is based on its Zen 3 architecture. This processor has a base clock speed of and a turbo speed of, being the most powerful of the 8-core AMD Ryzen 5000. Its base clock speed is 3.8 GHz, but it can reach 4.7 GHz if the speed is raised to a single core and to 4.5 GHz if the clock speed is temporarily raised on all cores.

The AMD Ryzen 5000 in general have the same external design as the Ryzen 3000, not surprisingly, they use the same central IO Die, so the access mechanisms to RAM, DDR4, and peripherals is the same as that of the Ryzen 3000. All this due to the fact that they use the same type of socket, AM4. In any case, the IO Die in the Ryzen 5000 has been improved, allowing higher clock speeds in the RAM than in the Ryzen 5000 compared to the Ryzen 3000.

Beyond the 8 nuclei

Our third category of CPUs is those that go beyond 8 cores, with which in the case of Intel we have to go back a generation and bet on a model of the tenth generation, since Intel in the case of Rocket Lake -S has decided not to go beyond 8 cores. That is why we have chosen the Intel Core i9-10900KF and its ten cores.

If we look from the AMD side, our bet is the 12-core CPU, the AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, also from the Ryzen 5000 family based on Zen 3.

10 Core Intel Core i9-10900KF CPU

In this case we are faced with a ten-core CPU based on Comet Lake architecture, so the performance at the same clock speed and core per core is somewhat lower than that of the rest of the models that we have previously discussed, but its performance in multithreading is superior with its ten cores that allow it to run up to 20 threads of execution.

The base clock speed of this CPU is 3.7 GHz with the ability to go up to 5.2 GHz maximum clock speed through Intel Turbo Boost 3.0 technology. Regarding memory support, its controller is designed for DDR-2933 memory, and although it can support faster memory, it will not take advantage of its bandwidth.

Its only negative point? It is the lack of support for PCI Express 4.0.

12-core AMD Ryzen 9 5900X CPU

The AMD Ryzen 9 5900X is a 12-core, 24-thread CPU, technically it’s like taking two CCD Chiplets from an AMD RX 5600X into a single CPU. So it is the only CPU with dual AMD chiplets that you will see in the entire comparison.

Its base clock speed? 3.7 GHz with the capacity to reach 4.8 GHz, with a 64 MB L3 cache, 32 MB in each of the CCD Chiplets. With a consumption of 105 watts. It is the most powerful processor that we have discussed in this article, not only because of its powerful 12-core configuration, but also because of the use of the Zen 3 architecture, which also implies that it is the most expensive of all, and because So much it is ideal if you want to mount a high-power gaming PC, so we recommend pairing it with a high-end GPU.

With this we finish our list of the best Intel and AMD CPUs of the moment, we hope that this list has been useful when choosing a new CPU for your PC.