The 13600K comes with a maximum power rating of 181W, but the chip sucks significantly less power than its prior-gen counterpart while delivering much more performance in gaming. The lowered power consumption allows the chip to work well with a wide variety of standard air and water coolers, but you'll need to make sure your model supports the LGA 1700 socket.
Speaking of which, you'll also need a new 700-series or previous-gen 600-series motherboard for the processor (with 600-series, make sure the BIOS supports the chip). You can find a wide selection of high-end models that support DDR5 memory, and although you'll find fewer lower-end and mid-range DDR4 motherboards, there's still plenty of selection available.
Like the rest of the Alder Lake family, the $122 Core i3-12100 comes to market with disruptive pricing, but it has seen price hikes that have brought it to $140, which isn't competitive. However, this chip also comes as a $106 F-series Core i3-12100F, which is an incredible value. Intel ships the 12100F with deactivated integrated graphics, but it is identical to the 12100 in all other ways.
In fact, with no clear current-gen competitor from AMD and stellar performance for its price point, the Core i3-12100 easily leads our CPU benchmark hierarchy in the $105 to $130 bracket. Overall, our testing shows that the quad-core i3-12100's potent combination of price, performance, and improved stock cooler dominates the $100 price range, though AMD has a much more powerful processor for $140, the alternate Ryzen 5 5600 listed below.
The Core i3-12100F now reigns as the fastest budget gaming CPU on the market, and it's plenty impressive in lightly-threaded apps, too. The Core i3-12100F is also impressive in threaded productivity workloads for its price point.
The Core i3-12100F comes with a 60W PBP (base) and 89W MTP (peak) power rating. The chip clocks in with a 3.3 GHz base and boosts up to 4.3 GHz. It also comes with 12 MB of L3 cache. Intel's Alder Lake drops into Socket 1700 motherboards from the 600- and 700-series, though the B660, and H610 boards are the most logical fit for a chip at this price point. The Core i3-12100F is a locked chip, meaning it isn't overclockable. However, Intel supports memory overclocking on Z690, B660, and H670 motherboards (Z690 doesn't make sense for this class of chip, though).
The Core i3-12100F doesn't have a similarly-priced competitor from AMD that can keep pace. However, despite a total lack of competition, it still brings impressive generational performance gains to the table. In fact, our 1080p gaming benchmarks show the $122 Core i3-12100 delivers 88% of the $170 Core i5-12400's performance, but for 30% less cash. That's a winning blend of price and performance.
Read: Intel Core i3-12100 Review
The Ryzen 5 5600G steps into the arena as the new value champ for APUs, which are chips that come with strong enough integrated graphics that they don't require a discrete GPU for light gaming, albeit if you're willing to accept lowered quality settings.
At $135, the Ryzen 5 5600G gives you 96% of the gaming performance on integrated graphics than its more expensive sibling, the $180 Ryzen 7 5700G, but for 25% less cash. Our testing shows that its level of performance makes it the best value APU on the market. As long as you're willing to sacrifice fidelity and resolution and keep your expectations in check, the Ryzen 5 5600G's Vega graphics have surprisingly good performance in gaming.
So, what do you get for $140? Six cores and 12 threads utilizing the Zen 3 architecture. On the surface, this is identical to the more expensive 5600X, as well as the Ryzen 5 5600 (which currently retails for around $185), but the 5500 is actually quite different from its neighbors. The 5500 is based on the same silicon that Ryzen APUs use, but with the integrated graphics disabled. This means the 5500 only has 16 MB of L3 cache as opposed to the 32 MB of the 5600X and 5600.
In spite of this lack of cache, the 5500 performs well enough to be worth it. The 5500 can easily do 120-plus frames per second in games]( -ryzen-5-5600-and-ryzen-5-5500-review) and has similar multi-threaded performance to the 5600 and 5600X. If you're looking for the best bang for your buck, it's just not worth it to pay $45 more for the 5600 or $60 more for the 5600X.
The Ryzen 5 5600G is basically the Ryzen 5 5500, so it has the same six Zen 3 cores, the same 12 threads, and the same 16 MB L3 cache, but it also has slightly higher clock speeds and working integrated graphics. At the time of writing, the 5600G can be found for around $170, and although this price isn't nearly as affordable as the venerable Ryzen 3 3200G (which often went on sale for well below $100), the 5600G is far more capable thanks to faster and more numerous CPU and GPU cores.
If you wanted to build a fast but budget-friendly PC without discrete graphics, the 5600G is the best Ryzen APU you can choose. Older and slower Ryzen APUs are either out of stock or are more expensive, which makes the 5600G really the only choice for this segment. Not that that's a bad thing, because the 5600G is significantly better than Ryzen 3000 APUs, which came out in 2018 and used the original Zen architecture.
Having launched in April at $299 (and currently retailing for around $285), the 5700X is essentially a discounted Ryzen 7 5800X, which launched for an eye-watering $449 in late 2020, but at the time of writing, is selling for around $310. The 5700X not only has a much, much more reasonable price tag but also has about the same performance in games and isn't far behind in multi-threaded applications and other software. Enabling Precision Boost Overdrive on the 5700X basically turns it into a 5800X with no discernible differences, making the more expensive 5800X almost pointless.
The 5800X3D is supposed to retail for $449, but it's more commonly found for around $470, which isn't great but isn't terrible either. Even at $449, though, the 5800X3D finds itself in an awkward position because both AMD and Intel's current-generation 12 core CPUs, the Ryzen 9 5900X and the Core i7-12700K, are currently on sale for just under $400. The 5900X and the 12700K aren't quite as fast in gaming but are far ahead of the 5800X3D in any application that can use more than eight cores.
The 5800X3D is the best choice for gamers who want the best or nearly the best gaming performance guaranteed while also saving some money. The 5950X and the 12900K are sometimes faster than the 5800X3D, but they're also significantly more expensive, especially the 12900K, which relies on fast but expensive DDR5 memory to do its best in games.
Of AMD's high-end Ryzen CPUs, the 12-core, 24-thread Ryzen 9 5900X is the best overall. Although it doesn't have the Ryzen 7 5800X3D's V-Cache and lacks the 16 cores of the Ryzen 9 5950X, it has a great combination of gaming performance, multi-threaded performance, and price. At the time of writing, the 5900X retails for about $390, lower than both the 5800X3d and the 5950X (which is going for about $540).
Perhaps the much more interesting comparison, however, is against the Ryzen 9 5950X. In games, the 5900X and 5950X are often neck and neck, which isn't surprising since more cores generally don't improve gaming performance. However, in multi-threaded workloads, the 5950X is only about 15% faster than the 5900X. Since the 5950X is nearly 40% more expensive than the 5900X, the 5900X clearly provides a much better bang for the buck.
It depends. For multi-thread performance, it's the Ryzen 9 5900X, which does very well in applications like Blender. For gaming, it's the Ryzen 7 5800X3D. However, all of these CPUs provide decent to great performance in both applications and games. You don't need a 5900X for work, nor do you need a 5800X3D to game.
At the moment, AMD and Intel provide very similar performance at any given price point. Intel's Core i9-12900K, however, is the overall fastest CPU you can buy. Ryzen 5000 CPUs are more power efficient than 12th-gen CPUs, which can be important for smaller and more compact PCs that use smaller CPU coolers.
If you're building a PC for general office work, like browsing the net, creating a spreadsheet or two, and answering emails, the Ryzen 3 is more than enough for your needs. It's also powerful enough for light gaming, especially if it's an APU. You can spot a Ryzen CPU with integrated graphics using its letter suffix, which for integrated graphics will come with a G or GE. For example, AMD's 5700G CPU comes with integrated graphics.
And once you've chosen between Ryzen 3, 5, 7, or 9, you can then pick which variant is best for you by checking the features you get against your budget. That way, you're sure your chosen processor fits your needs and budget exactly.
Moving on to games and... not much to say here either. The 3600 and 3600X basically delivered identical performance in Assassin's Creed Odyssey, the 3600X was 2% faster which equates to a 2 fps difference at most.
Other than that, the rule of thumb is to spend as much as you can, within reason. It's better to purchase a Ryzen 7 instead of a Ryzen 3 and needing to upgrade sooner, which will cost more eventually.
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