Tier 01
Office & HTPC
AMD Ryzen 5 8500G
£119
RRP
Six cores, integrated graphics, no fans on the GPU side.
- Socket
- AM5
- TDP
- 65 W
Buy if you are not gaming.
I rebuild a desktop or workstation every couple of years and end up doing the same research each time. These are the chips I would actually pay for this quarter, sorted by what the build is for — not by what is fastest on a chart.
One pick per use case, ascending by price. Tier 03 is the one most people are actually shopping for.
Six cores, integrated graphics, no fans on the GPU side.
Cheapest chip that does not bottleneck a current-gen GPU.
The 3D V‑Cache chip that nothing else catches at 1080p / 1440p.
Twelve cores for the days you also compile, render or transcode.
Sixteen cores, X3D cache, the no‑compromises pick.
One paragraph per tier — what it’s for, what to pair it with, what to walk away from.
Boring, cheap, sips power, drives two 4K displays from the iGPU. For a family PC or a meeting-room box this is the right answer.
Pair with a B650 board, 32 GB DDR5‑5200, and a quiet case. Total system cost lands well under £400. The Radeon 740M iGPU handles 1080p video playback and light gaming without drama. If you later add a GPU, the AM5 platform keeps pace with Zen 5 IPC.
Zen 5 at the low end. Fast single-thread, sensible thermals, pairs happily with a B650 board and DDR5‑6000. Pair with a 7800 XT or 5070.
At 65 W the 9600X runs cool enough for a 120mm tower air cooler. Six cores is fine for every game shipping in 2026; nothing at the £300 GPU range is bottlenecked by it. The 9600 (non-X) saves £20 if you find one.
Genuinely the fastest gaming CPU on the market and will be for another year. Eight cores is fine — the cache is doing the work.
Wants a 240mm AIO; a good tower air cooler will also do. Pair with a B650E or X670E board and DDR5‑6000 CL30. The productivity delta vs. the 9700X is small — if you encode or render frequently, look at the 9900X instead. If gaming is 80 % of your usage, this is the only chip worth considering above £250.
Strong at games, strong at threaded workloads, doesn’t need a 360mm AIO. The chip I’d put in my own desktop right now.
Twelve Zen 5 cores at 5.6 GHz boost. A 240mm AIO keeps it happy. This is the build for a developer who games: compile fast enough that the wait is never the bottleneck, and game at 1440p without apology. The 9950X only makes sense if you genuinely saturate 12 cores regularly.
If you need both render performance and X3D gaming speed in one socket, this is what you buy. Otherwise the 9900X above is the better value.
170 W under full load; needs a quality 360mm AIO and a board with solid VRMs. An X670E is the right pairing. The 9950X3D beats the non-X3D in both gaming and the majority of production workloads. If budget is a constraint at all, buy the 9900X and spend the difference on more storage or a better GPU.
14 chips from both vendors. Gaming and multi-thread scores are normalised to the class leader — 100 means best in class.
| T | CPU | Gen | Cores | Boost | L3 | TDP | Socket | Gaming | Multi-T | MSRP |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 05 | AMDRyzen 9 9950X3DTop end |
Zen 5 X3D | 16 / 32 | 5.7GHz | 128 MB | 170 W | AM5 | £729 | ||
| 04 | AMDRyzen 9 9950X |
Zen 5 | 16 / 32 | 5.7GHz | 64 MB | 170 W | AM5 | £599 | ||
| 04 | AMDRyzen 9 9900XAll-rounder |
Zen 5 | 12 / 24 | 5.6GHz | 64 MB | 120 W | AM5 | £499 | ||
| 03 | AMDRyzen 7 9800X3DGaming |
Zen 5 X3D | 8 / 16 | 5.2GHz | 96 MB | 120 W | AM5 | £449 | ||
| 03 | IntelCore Ultra 9 285K |
Arrow Lake | 24 / 24 | 5.7GHz | 36 MB | 125 W | LGA1851 | £589 | ||
| 03 | AMDRyzen 7 9700X |
Zen 5 | 8 / 16 | 5.5GHz | 32 MB | 65 W | AM5 | £359 | ||
| 03 | IntelCore Ultra 7 265K |
Arrow Lake | 20 / 20 | 5.5GHz | 30 MB | 125 W | LGA1851 | £399 | ||
| 03 | AMDRyzen 7 7800X3D |
Zen 4 X3D | 8 / 16 | 5.0GHz | 96 MB | 120 W | AM5 | £379 | ||
| 02 | AMDRyzen 5 9600XBudget |
Zen 5 | 6 / 12 | 5.4GHz | 32 MB | 65 W | AM5 | £219 | ||
| 02 | IntelCore Ultra 5 245K |
Arrow Lake | 14 / 14 | 5.2GHz | 24 MB | 125 W | LGA1851 | £269 | ||
| 02 | AMDRyzen 5 7600X |
Zen 4 | 6 / 12 | 5.3GHz | 32 MB | 105 W | AM5 | £179 | ||
| 01 | AMDRyzen 5 8500GiGPU |
Zen 4 APU | 6 / 12 | 5.0GHz | 16 MB | 65 W | AM5 | £119 | ||
| 01 | AMDRyzen 5 8600G |
Zen 4 APU | 6 / 12 | 5.0GHz | 16 MB | 65 W | AM5 | £169 | ||
| 01 | IntelCore i3‑14100 |
Raptor Lake | 4 / 8 | 4.7GHz | 12 MB | 60 W | LGA1700 | £99 | ||
| Gaming and multi-thread scores normalised to class leader (100 = best). Prices are UK street prices, April 2026. | ||||||||||
Pick and an alternative for ten common tasks. The pick is the best chip for that job right now; the alt is what to buy if the pick is out of budget or out of stock.
The five factors that drive every pick on this page.