CPU benchmarks performance hierarchy

Our CPU benchmarks performance hierarchy ranks current and previous-gen Intel and AMD processors based on performance, including the best CPUs for Gaming.

Our CPU Benchmarks Performance Hierarchy

Our CPU benchmarks performance hierarchy ranks current and previous-gen Intel and AMD processors based on performance, including all of the best CPUs for gaming.

Below the CPU ranking charts and tables, this guide also provides a basic introduction to CPU benchmarks and includes a list of commonly-used CPU benchmark applications.

Tom's Hardware has benchmarked CPUs for over 25 years, preserving many of our legacy historical CPU rankings on the second page of this article. This gives you CPU benchmarks performance with modern chips on the first page, while presenting historical context with older processors on the second page.

Your CPU greatly affects overall performance and is considered a computer's most important component, so it's worth getting familiar with how to benchmark a CPU and what sort of benchmarking tools you can use.

The Best CPUs

Here are the best CPUs:

Game Testing Ranking

We've included a variety of different test results in the album above. Our step up to a new RTX 4090 has re-ordered our hierarchy quite a bit, so we have made a clean break for our rankings.

Here are the best CPUs for gaming:

The Ryzen 7 7800X3D, priced at $449, is now the fastest gaming chip money can buy. Although AMD's 3D V-Cache technology is not the perfect gaming chip, it is the uncontested leader for gaming. The tech doesn't accelerate all games and results in reduced performance in some applications. If you want to save some money and don't care about having the fastest gaming CPU, we recommend the Ryzen 5 5600. Priced at $199, it's almost as good as the Ryzen 5 7800X in gaming.

On the ultra-high-end gaming-focused rigs, the Ryzen 9 7950X3D, priced at $699, is the uncontested leader. With 16 cores and 32 threads, it's easily the best gaming CPU. The Ryzen 9 7900X3D faces off with the Intel Core i9-13900KS, which has a record 6 GHz clock rate. However, its pricing is too high. The 13900KS, priced at $699, is among the fastest desktop PC chips ever made, but it requires expensive supporting componentry to deliver a single-digit percentage CPU benchmark improvement over the standard Core i9-13900K.

On the lower end of the spectrum, we also recently tested the Core i3-13100F, priced at $110. It provides solid performance in gaming for its price point. However, we recommend picking the Ryzen 5 5600 instead of the non-F Core i3-13100, which is also available with graphics as the $150 Core i3-13100.

We are currently testing Intel's mighty Xeon W9-3945X, which comes with 56 cores and 112 threads. This marks Intel's first competitive workstation chip in quite some time. Intel's new lineup of Xeon W processors straddle the line between HEDT and workstation markets. We'll also add results from the Threadripper Pro family to our rankings when we update with the new CPU benchmarks.