You want a new processor, you’ve checked out our best CPU for gaming guide, and now you need to know the best CPU deals available right now. Well, we can help out with that too!
Your graphics card may be the component which delivers the beauty for your gaming PC, but it’s the processor which is the brains of the outfit. No matter what you’re doing with your rig, whether it’s Planetside 2 or Minecraft, the processor will be doing all the important number crunching, so you want to make sure you’re getting the right one and for the right money.
Some highlights this week: There are a whole lot of people out there with Haswell motherboards (either Z87 / H87 or Z97 / H97 boards) and if you want to upgrade your processor without ripping the heart out of your machine you can still pick up our previous favourite CPU, the mighty Core i5-4690K, for $225. It’s a great drop-in gaming upgrade for anyone running a Haswell i3 or lower-end i5 processor.
At the other end of the scale AMD’s fan-favourite budget chip, the FX-6300, can be had for a little under $100 right now. Even if AMD cores don’t equal Intel cores, the six full threads of eminently-overclockable processing power means it can give the Pentium Anniversary Edition a good run for its money.
– If you’re looking to update your Haswell system without ripping out the motherboard, our previous favourite gaming CPU, the Intel Core i5-4690K, can be picked up on SuperBiiz for just $224.99.
– Until the new Zen chips roll around later this year (hopefully) the AMD FX-9590 is the pinnacle of the company’s processing power and fits the same AM3+ socket as the other modern FX chips. You can grab it with free shipping at B&H for $229.95.
– If that’s a little too rich for your blood the similarly octo-core AMD FX-8350 will fit the same socket and has $10 off over at Newegg, where it’s $159.99.
– One of the best-value gaming chips around is AMD’s FX-6300. An overclockable six-core CPU capable of seriously impressive clockspeeds and it’s available with free expedited shipping at B&H for just $99.99.
– Now we love internet shopping for its convenience, but when bricks and mortar stores offer great deals we’d be remiss for not pointing them out. Our favourite high-end gaming CPU, the Intel Core i7-5820K, is available with $100 off with in-store pickup only at Micro Center for just $319.99.
In our guide to the best gaming processors we’ve picked out our favourite overall gaming CPU, the best high-end option and the best budget processor for gaming.
And here are the best prices we’ve found around the web for each of them today…
“Although this i5 has an almost identical spec to our previous favourite CPU, the Core i5-4690K, overall performance for this processor trumps its predecessor by up to 10% in rendering, archiving and other workstation simulated tasks.”
“Is this truly still better than Skylake’s crème de la crème of processors, the i7-6700K? Yep, absolutely. In computational benchmarks those six cores run rings around its Skylake cousin.”
“While it’s a no-frills processor, as it’s only a dual-core model, and lacks Turbo Mode or hyper-threading, this is still enough to drive the majority of games at playable resolution and detail settings.”
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