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 gives you a basic introduction to CPU benchmarking and includes a list of commonly-used CPU benchmark utilities.

Your CPU greatly affects overall performance and is considered a computer's most important component. CPU benchmark comparisons help us sort out the differences between chips, but when it comes time to buy a CPU for your desktop, you'll find a dizzying collection of model numbers and specs from both Intel and AMD. We've listed the best CPUs for gaming and best CPUs for workstations in other articles, but if you want to know how each chip stacks up against all the others and how we come to our decisions, this CPU benchmarks hierarchy is for you. If you're looking for a broader view of the current state of the market, head to our Intel vs AMD feature for more CPU comparisons.

If you're looking for a new chip today, you should consider AMD's current promotion. The Ryzen 7000 Series bundle includes discounts on AM5 motherboards and DDR5 kits that could total up to $125. You also get a free game with your purchase. The program runs from February 27 to April 1, 2023 — find the details here. This bundle comes on the cusp of the much-anticipated release of AMD's Ryzen 9 7950X3D on February 28, but the deal doesn't appear to apply to those new processors — at least not yet. As you would imagine, we'll be adding the 7950X3D to our charts soon.

We recently tested the Intel Core i9-13900KS, which throws power and heat out the window to attain a 6 GHz clock rate that keeps Raptor Lake at the top of our CPU benchmarks. The 13900KS is the fastest desktop PC chip ever made, but that comes with plenty of caveats, like a $699 price tag and a voracious appetite for power that requires expensive supporting componentry, like a high-end motherboard, cooler, and power supply, all of which provide a single-digit percentage improvement over the vanilla Core i9-13900K. Overall, the 13900KS' small performance gains don't make sense for the average user.

We also have plenty of testing with the first Raptor Lake chips, which come in the form of the Core i9-13900K, Core i7-13700K, and Core i5-13600K. These chips are game-changers, upsetting AMD's product stack and offering a better value at every price point. We also recently tested the Intel Core i5-13400, which we've added below.

We benchmarked AMD's value-centric lineup of "Non-X" Ryzen 7000 65W processors in our AMD Ryzen 9 7900, Ryzen 7 7700, and Ryzen 5 7600 Review: Zen 4 Gets More Affordable article. These chips lower the entry-level pricing to AMD's potent AM5 ecosystem drastically, but Intel's Raptor Lake still holds the advantage in most of the key price bands. That might change in the middle of next month when AMD's new lineup of three Ryzen 7000X3D processors land with the company's revolutionary 3D V-Cache technology.

AMD's full-powered Ryzen 7000 processors are impressive. We reviewed the Ryzen 9 7950X and Ryzen 5 7600X and have added those chips to the CPU benchmark rankings below. We've also added the Ryzen 9 7900X and the Ryzen 7 7700X, too.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have AMD's fire-breathing 64-core 128-thread Threadripper Pro 5995WX in the charts, along with the 32-core 64-thread Threadripper Pro 5975WX and 3975WX. These chips provide surprisingly strong performance in gaming, but they're geared specifically for the workstation market. Intel has announced that its new Fishhawk Falls workstation processors, which include quasi-HEDT models, too, are headed to market next month. As such, we'll have plenty of new workstation CPU benchmarks to add to these charts in the coming weeks. 

We'll explain how we ranked the processors under each table. The game testing ranking is first. We also include a productivity application performance metric, which we've split up into single- and multi-threaded measurements. We also have an integrated graphics CPU gaming benchmark ranking so you can see how AMD's APUs stack up to Intel's processors.

We have two sets of benchmarks 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. All of our Windows 11 tests above were conducted with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090, and we'll build out all future test results with this platform.

We rank all the Intel and AMD processors using the Windows 11 and RTX 4090 test bench in the tables below, but we don't include CPU overclock performance rankings. You can see all of those numbers in the charts above. We've also added separate charts for integrated graphics testing below.

Because we have a much broader selection of test results with our now-legacy Windows 10 and RTX 3090 platform, we've also included slides with those results in the above album. You can also find those results in table form in our legacy section at the end of the article.

Bear in mind that the charts above use the raw performance numbers, whereas our CPU benchmarks rankings in the tables below use a score to rank the chips relative to one another. 

We have two rankings for each chip, based on 1080p and 1440p CPU gaming benchmarks. We conducted these tests in Windows 11. The most powerful chip gets a 100, and all others are scored relative to it. We tested all platforms that support DDR5 with the newer memory — in general, Intel's chips lose a few percentage points of performance with DDR4 memory (more testing here). We also have DDR4 vs DDR5 testing in our legacy testing further below.

The chart is aligned in order based on the 1080p game results, but the 1440p listings aren't listed in sequential order due to unfortunate limitations with our tables. So pay attention to the 1440p rankings: Some faster chips at 1440p CPU benchmarks may be listed below slower chips due to the 1080p results.

We're working to expand this roster of gaming CPU benchmarks quickly, with the 12th-Gen Alder Lake chips on our test bench now. We will test back to the seventh-gen Intel and the AMD Bulldozer chips over the next few months, so keep an eye out for our updates. For now, head to our legacy section below for all Pre- 12th-Gen and Zen 3 benchmarks.

We measured performance for the 1080p CPU gaming benchmarks with a geometric mean of Cyberpunk 2077, Hitman 3, Far Cry 6, F1 2021, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2021, Red Dead Redemption 2, Warhammer 3, and Watch Dogs Legion. Not all games scale well moving from 1080p to 1440p, so we measured performance for the 1440p CPU gaming benchmarks with a geometric mean of Far Cry 6, F1 2021, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2021, Red Dead Redemption 2, Warhammer 3 and Watch Dogs Legion.

Here's our list of gaming performance with integrated graphics on several of the leading APUs available. We've split this into two different price ranges, so be sure to flip through all of the performance charts. For a bit of commentary and analysis of these results, head to our Ryzen 7 5700G, Ryzen 5 5600G, and Ryzen 3 5300G reviews. The most powerful chip gets a 100, and all others are scored relative to it.

We calculate the above single-threaded CPU benchmarks rankings based on a geometric mean of the Cinebench, POV-Ray, and LAME CPU benchmarks. The most powerful chip gets a 100, and all others are scored relative to it.

Single-threaded performance is often tied directly to the responsiveness and snappiness of your PC in any number of daily applications, like loading an operating system or surfing the web. This metric largely depends upon a mixture of instruction per cycle (IPC) throughput (the number of operations the chip can execute in one clock cycle) and frequency, which is the speed at which the transistors switch between on and off states.

However, a whole host of other considerations, such as cache, architecture, and interconnects (like rings, meshes, and infinity fabric) impact this measure of per-core performance, so these results do not align perfectly based on clock frequency. Instead, performance varies with each application and how well it is tuned for the respective architectures.

The multi-threaded workload column is based on CPU benchmarks performance in Cinebench, POV-ray, vray, Blender (four tests - Koro, Barcellona, Classroom, bmw27), y-cruncher, and Handbrake x264 and x265 workloads. These CPU benchmarks represent performance in productivity-focused applications that tend to require more compute horsepower. The most powerful chip gets a 100, and all others are scored relative to it.

Like we see with single-threaded performance metrics, multi-threaded performance, which measures a chip's performance in applications that utilize multiple software threads, varies based on a whole host of architectural factors. It also depends heavily upon how well the software scales with additional compute cores. As such, these results do not align perfectly based on core/thread count, though it does serve as a decent litmus of multi-threaded performance. 

Be aware that architectures, caches, and interconnects profoundly impact these results, as all of these factors impact how well performance scales with additional threads. Performance rarely scales perfectly with the addition of more cores/threads, so the scaling factor of each processor architecture weighs heavily on the value proposition of going with a higher core count processor.

Benchmarking your CPU is an essential practice for CPU overclocking, or if you're merely tuning your system. Simply run a CPU benchmark before you make any changes, then re-test after changes to see the results. You can head to our deep-dive details of overclocking in our How to Overclock a CPU guide for more details on tuning your processor, but if you want to learn how to benchmark your CPU, you're in the right place.

How do you benchmark your CPU? Well, that's not as complicated as you might think. Choosing the best CPU benchmarks can be a daunting task, but the general rule is that the best performance benchmark is simply measuring the performance of the programs you use the most. However, you might not be able to find other benchmarks to compare to, so these real-world benchmarks might not help you compare your performance to other CPUs.

However, if the programs you frequently use don't have built-in benchmarks you can also use similar types of programs (renderers or encoders, for instance) as a proxy for your workload. There are also several well-known benchmarks with large databases that enable easy comparisons. You can also compare your results to the benchmarks you see in our library of reviews to get a good sense of how your system stacks up. We have a list of some great productivity benchmarks, and their download links, below.

These same theories apply to CPU game benchmarking — the best CPU benchmark is the game that you play the most. You can download an fps counter, like FRAPS, to measure performance during your gaming session. Games can vary widely, so we don't have a specific list of titles to test. However, you can use the gaming CPU benchmarks you see in our reviews as a good starting point.

You can also use synthetic gaming CPU benchmarks, a few of which we have listed below. Just be aware that these synthetic CPU benchmarks don't tend to translate well to real-world gaming, but they do show us the raw amount of compute power exposed to game engines. However, given their stability and repeatability, these are great benchmarks for comparing performance before and after any changes you may make to your system. 

Most often overlook web-browser performance, but these are among the best CPU benchmarks to measure performance in single-threaded workloads, which helps quantify the snappiness in your system. This also often directly correlates to performance in games that prize single-threaded performance. We've included a few web browser benchmarks below as well.

If you plan to compare to other gaming and application CPU benchmark results from reviews, forums, or friends, be sure to turn off as many background tasks as possible during your benchmarks to eliminate that influence from your CPU benchmark results. Here's a list with download links for some of the most common CPU benchmarks:

These tests are from our 2023 test bench. We measured performance for the 1080p CPU gaming benchmarks with a geometric mean of Borderlands 3, Hitman 2, Far Cry 5, Project CARS 3, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider. We measured performance for the 1440p CPU gaming benchmarks with a geometric mean of Borderlands 3, Project CARS 3, Far Cry 5, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider. We conducted these tests in Windows 10.

These results are from our 2023 test bench. We calculate the above single-threaded CPU benchmarks rankings based on a geometric mean of the Cinebench, POV-Ray, and LAME CPU benchmarks. The most powerful chip gets a 100, and all others are scored relative to it. We conducted these tests in Windows 10.

These tests are from our 2023 test bench. The multi-threaded workload column is based on CPU benchmarks performance in Cinebench, POV-ray, vray, Blender (four tests - Koro, Barcellona, Classroom, bmw27), y-cruncher, and Handbrake x264 and x265 workloads. These CPU benchmarks represent performance in productivity-focused applications that tend to require more compute horsepower. The most powerful chip gets a 100, and all others are scored relative to it. We conducted these benchmarks in Windows 10. 

Recognizing that a lot of older platforms are going to be paired with graphics subsystems multiple generations old, we wanted to define the top of our range to encourage balance between host processing and complementary GPUs. At this point, anyone with a Sandy Bridge-based Core i7 would realize a gain from stepping up to Coffee Lake or Kaby Lake, for example. And putting AMD's top FX CPUs next to a handful of Core i7s and those older Core i5s represents an upgrade to their status.

Currently, our hierarchy consists of 13 total tiers. The bottom half of the chart is largely outdated; you'll notice those CPUs dragging down performance in the latest games, whether you have one of the best graphics cards or not. If you own a CPU in that range, an upgrade could really take your experience to another level.

Really, it's the top five tiers or so that remain viable. And in that top half of the chart, an upgrade is typically worthwhile if it's a least a couple of tiers higher. Otherwise, there's just not enough improvement to warrant the expense of a fresh CPU, motherboard and RAM (not to mention the graphics card and storage solution you'd be considering as well).