The Best CPUs From The Top Half Of 2020

It’s A Good Year To Be Made Of Silicon

The carbon based userbase has not had a good year, but CPUs certainly have had a stellar year with impressive releases from both Intel and AMD and TechSpot takes a look at what the best of 2020 has to offer you.   There is both good and bad news for Intel in this roundup; as their Core i9-10900K and Core i5-10600K took the Best Gaming CPU category.  The i9-10900K tops gaming benchmarks, even at higher resolutions but can be out of reach for some budgets which is why the Core i5-10600K shares this category.   AMD’s Ryzen 7 3700X offers a better choice for a mix of computing tasks, if you will only ever be gaming and surfing on your machine then Intel’s offering is a great choice.

The bad news for Intel is that they do not appear again on the list, for tasks other than pure gaming or for system building on a budget AMD sweeps every other category.   For anyone looking for the most powerful and proficient chip, look no further than the Threadripper 3990X which justifies the expense of building a system based around AMD’s most powerful desktop chip by providing the best performance overall. 

The two flagship chips fall outside of the budget of many, which is why TechSpot offers three categories for best value in silicon.  If you are looking for the best solution for productivity and general usage then they recommend you pick up the highest model of AMD Ryzen 7 or Ryzen 9 you can afford.  The architecture scales well, so simply pick up the best one you can afford or if you can’t quite reach that price level the Ryzen 5 3600 is the best all around value for your money.

Last, but not least are the Ryzen 3 3300X if you can fit a GPU into your budget or the Ryzen 5 3400G if you are delaying purchasing a GPU or simply don’t need one in a specific build.  Check out their reasoning in the full article.