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Best Gaming CPUs For The Money: December 2013

Best Gaming CPUs For The Money: December 2013
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The holiday season sees the FX-6300 price drop lower than ever before. In addition, slight drops on key Intel processors coupled with the arrival of low-cost Socket 1150 motherboards prompt us to reconsider our high-end recommendations. More inside!

If you don’t have the time to research benchmarks, or if you don’t feel confident enough in your ability to pick the right processor for your next gaming machine, fear not. We at Tom’s Hardware have come to your aid with a simple list of the best gaming CPUs offered for the money.

December Updates: 

With no new models from AMD or Intel, this holiday season's CPU news is firmly anchored to price adjustments.

From AMD, we see a smal drop on the A6-3500 (£50) and the FX-6300 (now £85). While the A6-3500 APU offers little to the hardcore gaming crowd, that FX-6300 is a more impressive deal. Given a 30 W-lower TDP compared to the FX-4130 (which is hard to get in the UK) and a third Piledriver module, the FX-6300 comes away with our lone recommendation.

Beyond those two tweaks, AMD continues playing strange pricing games with its FX-9370 and FX-9590. As I write this, the former is down to £170 without a cooler. The FX-9590 is now more expensive, at least in the US market. In the UK it's priced at £233 sans cooler.

Finally, the FX-8120 was de-listed from Dabs and Scan. We've seen roadmaps showing the FX family stagnating. AMD says it doesn't plan to discontinue the line-up, but without an update to the Steamroller micro-architecture imminent, we wonder how long these CPUs will remain relevant parts of the company's portfolio.

Intel's Core i3-4330 is now priced £100, though we'd still probably prefer the Core i3-4130. The Core i5-4670K and Core i7-4770K also fell by a small margin. They're now almost on par with the previous-generation Core i5-3570K and Core i7-3770K. Because of this, and due to a tighter focus on LGA 1150-based motherboards, we think it's time to start recommending Haswell-based CPUs in the £180-and-over space, rather than older Ivy Bridge-based models. This includes adopting the Ivy Bridge-E-based Core i7-4930K over older Sandy Bridge-E-derived processors.

Some Notes About Our Recommendations

This list is for gamers who want to get the most for their money. If you don’t play games, then the CPUs on this list may not be suitable for your particular needs.

The criteria to get on this list are strictly price/performance. We acknowledge that there are other factors that come into play, such as platform price or CPU overclockability, but we're not going to complicate things by factoring in motherboard costs. We may add honorable mentions for outstanding products in the future, though. For now, our recommendations are based on stock clock speeds and performance at that price.

Cost and availability change on a daily basis. We can’t offer up-to-the-minute accurate pricing information in the text, but we can list some good chips that you probably won’t regret buying at the price ranges we suggest (and our PriceGrabber-based engine will help track down some of the best prices for you).

The list is based on some of the best US/U.K. prices from online retailers. In other countries or at retail stores, your mileage will most certainly vary. Of course, these are retail CPU prices. We do not list used or OEM CPUs available at retail.               

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  • 2 Hide
    MajinCry , 27 December 2013 11:49
    The 750K is a brilliant deal at that price point.

    Now, if only we could bypass Intel's compiler...
  • 1 Hide
    GalaxyMaster , 27 December 2013 21:57
    What about the AMD FX-8350? It costs only £20 more than the Intel Core i5-3350P, and performs better when using all cores, and only a little bit worse when using a single thread, and can over-clock really well. £20 for over-clocking is already a good deal, and it also has just better performance. So why isn't it on this list???
  • 0 Hide
    MajinCry , 27 December 2013 22:13
    Probably because Tom's gets a nice lil' commision for promoting Intel?

    Intel's done that sort of thing for a long time with most OEMs, such as Dell and Acer.
  • 1 Hide
    Nefos , 28 December 2013 12:59
    I am seriously missing Fx 8320 here
    £107 with Far Cry Blood Dragon, i5 performance, easy OC to 8350 level, loads of great motherboards at low price point
  • 0 Hide
    brianthesnail , 2 January 2014 15:29
    ive been using intel cpu,s since the days of the Pentium 3,however when I can get a quad core processor for under £60 I think its time to re evaluate my allegiances
    throw in a sub £50 FM2 mobo and my existing 8gb ddr3 ram and im looking at a quad core bundle for a whisper over £100..... ( currently using a Pentium G620 ) ....
    at the end of the day ( and with money tight ) it makes more sense buying the Athlon X4 750K and then overclocking it to 4.2ghz... that said with a 4ghz turbo clock I don't think I will need to ....
  • 0 Hide
    Davidest , 15 January 2014 17:39
    If you are going for a very high power CPU looking also for some overclock definitely go with the Intel Core i7-4770K. It costs around 300/320 $.
    Something a little bit cheaper but still very powerful is AMD FX-8350 Eight-Core for around 200 $.