re: Build the Best Gaming PC Your Money Can Buy: A Detailed Guide (Updated Sep 2014)

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++++ALERT: You are reading an out-of-date version of the guide and wasting your time. Read the PDF for the most accurate up-to-date info.It's best to download the PDF and use a proper PDF reader. Google's formatting of PDFs breaks all of the links. Link to directly download the PDF. I have stopped updating the text in the thread because the forum's limited code makes it far too time-consuming to change images and add text.++++
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###Ideal Gaming CPUs###
The table below lists a few gaming CPUs worth considering, in rough order of overall gaming performance—or perhaps I should say “in order of ideal choice” since people will inevitably disagree (which further stresses how marginal the differences can be). I’ve also included their approximate price points and information about their platforms (we’ll discuss these platforms more in the Motherboard section). Keep in mind that there are other CPUs that fall below, above, and within these price points, but I consider these to be the most optimal choices when building a competent gaming PC today:



As shown above, several of the Intel CPUs in that list use socket 1155, the platform that was replaced with socket 1150 in June 2013. For that reason, many people will recommend that you avoid 1155 and choose a socket that’s “current” or still in production. I would recommend this, too, but I’ll admit that it’s purely for psychological, superficial reasons—because newer is better. There’s a bump in performance, and you won’t see the older CPUs go down in price much.

One of the main points people cite in favor of the newest platform is a better upgrade path. Logic dictates that if you buy the newest CPU for the newest socket, you’ll be able to easily upgrade your CPU in the future without having to replace your motherboard. However, Intel platforms are generally replaced after releasing two families of CPUs. Haswell is the first family for socket 1150, but history shows that the next line of CPUs will have a marginal performance boost that you won’t notice in gaming. As for AMD, the CPUs available today are likely the best value you’ll see for the AM3+ socket before something new comes along, and it’s likely that won’t happen for a while.

The fact is, by the time you’d truly benefit from a CPU upgrade, you will have to replace the motherboard with it anyway.

###Extreme/Enthusiast Platform Options###
As we saw previously in the benchmark results, Intel’s high-end CPUs (priced as high as $1,000+) don’t add any worthwhile performance advantage in games. However, if you are working with a large budget and perhaps intend to use your PC for video editing/encoding, 3D modeling, and other workhorse-type tasks—or if you just have money to burn and need a platform for your 3 or 4 NVIDIA GTX Titans, here are some CPU options, sorted by architecture and price:



====///====My CPU Picks====\\\====
$1,000–$1,100 Budget—Intel Core i5-4670K
Why the 4670K: As I said, the 4670K outperforms AMD’s 8350 significantly in per-core performance and essentially matches it in multithreaded performance. This will translate to better performance in current CPU-intensive games, but if you are drawn to AMD for some reason, I won't try too hard to stop you from opting for the 8350 instead. The 4670K is around $230, and the 8350 hovers around $195–200 as of September 2013.

About the “K” in 4670K and 3570K: For these CPUs, the “K” indicates that they have unlocked multipliers. Without going into too much detail, an unlocked multiplier makes overclocking easy. I know I said this guide would not cover overclocking, but there is a certain level of “free” performance you can gain from a small overclock that may not require extra voltage or much added heat. Intel also sells an i5-4670 or 3570 for a few dollars less, but once you’ve built your PC and become familiar with the hardware, in all likelihood you will want to begin researching how to overclock. Using an unlocked CPU will make it much easier. All of the CPUs in the above charts have unlocked multipliers, except for the i3 CPUs and the i7-3820.

$800 Budget—AMD FX-8350
Why the 8350: It is priced under $200 and fits this budget nicely. Its performance in most games will be similar to the Intel.

$600 Budget—AMD FX-6300
[u][i]Why the 6300[u][i]: It’s an appropriately scaled down CPU for this budget with very good performance. It won’t bottleneck your graphics card, which is the most important part, and it should give good performance in CPU-intensive games. You could get the i3-3220 or 3240 if you are Intel biased. However, I actually recommend the FX-6300 at this price point. While the i3 performs better in some of today’s poorly threaded games, the 6300 appears to have a noticeable advantage in most games that use the extra threads. As time passes, the i3 will probably be at a further disadvantage in next-gen games as a dual-core CPU. It does feature hyperthreading to allow it to process 2 threads per core, but even its per-thread performance may not be enough if/when games become more optimized to take full advantage of even more physical cores.

You could also get the FX-6350, which is a 6300 that has been pre-overclocked. There is a small performance boost, but it also has a higher thermal design power (TDP)—125W vs. 95W.