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Whether you’re Team Intel or Team AMD, you don’t have to look far to find a fantastic gaming processor.
Picking a processor is a tough decision, but for all the right reasons. It’s a mega-competitive market out there with Intel and AMD delivering new, innovative and affordable processors. Intel’s 14th-gen Core chips have been less innovative and more iterative, but it’s still managing to hold up to AMD’s 3D V-Cache in gaming performance, and that’s keeping both companies a little more honest.
The most exciting development in CPUs lately has been on AMD’s side, where you have the breakthrough 3D V-Cache technology. This allows AMD to stick heaps more cache onto its processors, and you know what sort of application adores cache? Games.
Ryzen 7 7800X3D
Cache, cache baby
1 This is the best gaming processor AMD has ever produced. We don’t say that lightly, as lately AMD has been on a roll with excellent CPUs. However, this chip is different in one very important way. The key to its success is something called 3D V-Cache. 3D V-Cache is a manufacturing technology that allows AMD to bond an extra 64MB of L3 cache right on top of a CPU’s cores. The reason why you might want that extra cache close by to your processor cores is clear when you look at gaming benchmarks. In F1 2021, the 7800X3D is 33% faster than the
7700X – both CPUs have the same Zen 4 cores, eight of them apiece, and the 7700X is able to boost quite a bit higher. But it still loses that fight. Not every game will respond quite so well to 3D V-Cache, but generally the 7800X3D is faster than the 7700X. However, the real miracle of V-Cache is in how little power this chip needs. The 7800X3D peaks at just 81W whereas the 7700X gobbles up 143W. This chip is diabolically good.
VERDICT
→ 3DV-Cache
→ So efficient
→ Runs cool
SPECS CORES: 8 / THREADS: 16 / ARCHITECTURE: ZEN 4 / L3 CACHE: 96MB / TDP: 120W / SOCKET: AM5
Core i7 14700K
Do it all
2 If you’re building a 2 high-end gaming PC, the 14700K is really all you need. I know you want a Core i9, but consider this: Intel has stuffed four more E-cores onto the 14700K than the previous gen Core i7, meaning it’s now only four short of the Core i9. It’s practically a match in terms of gaming performance and it’s awfully close in multithreaded benchmarks – why spend more? The 14700K is a genuinely impressive chip, and one of two 14th-gen processors worth buying over its 13th-gen counterpart (the other being the 14700KF). It will happily trade blows with AMD’s Ryzen 7 7800X3D in games and wipes the floor with it in Blender or other applications that favour lots of cores. This fantastic blend of gaming and multithreading is thanks to Intel’s hybrid architecture. This chip comes with eight Performance-cores and 12
