Best processors 2018: top CPUs for your PC

Back in 2017, when Intel’s Coffee Lake and AMD’s Ryzen CPUs made it out in the wild, the long-standing stagnation in the CPU world ceased overnight. Now, the longstanding competition between these two tech behemoths has been fully reignited, and Intel and AMD are at each other’s throats, competing for your interest. Thankfully, out of this competition, the best processors that have ever existed were born, and there’s never been a better time to upgrade to one of the best chips on the market.

Now that AMD is getting ready to unleash their Ryzen 2nd Generation CPUs, and Intel is pairing up with AMD to launch CPUs featuring discrete Radeon RX Vega graphics, it’s a great time to go out and buy one of the best processors. However, the CPU market, by its very nature, is extremely volatile – which can make it difficult to figure out the best processor for your needs. Fortunately, we here at TechRadar have your back – we’ve been riding this CPU train for years, and we’ve gathered together this list of the best processors you can be today. And because we’ve tested all of these CPUs ourselves, you can be confident you’re getting your money’s worth.

In 2018, there is a chance for everyone to get their hands on one of the best processors – regardless of budget. Both AMD and Intel are offering a wide range of CPUs in every shape and size. Even if you can’t get your hands on one of the newest CPUs on the market, there are still plenty of great Kaby Lake processors that are more than worth it. So, no matter what you’re looking to do – whether you’re a bleeding-edge enthusiast or someone who just wants something that works – this competition and innovation means everyone’s a winner.

Trust us, we get it. You pull up Amazon or Newegg, looking for the best processor for gaming, and immediately you’re flooded with a wave of confusing model numbers. This confusion is natural and is an unfortunate side effect of the booming CPU market. Fortunately, TechRadar has your back – we’ve created this list of the best processors available in 2018. Every single chip on this list was tested and reviewed by us, so you can be confident that they’ll be worth your time and money. So, sit back, relax and get ready to realize PC performance you’ve previously only dreamed of.

During the Coffee Lake-S launch, Intel claimed that it’d be giving us its best gaming processor ever; they weren’t wrong. This ’K’ series chip decimates AMD’s flagship in almost every way possible. Abandoning the company’s invisible rule to keep processors sporting over four cores out of the hands of the mainstream, the i7-8700K makes hexa-core the new vogue.

Read our full review: Intel Core i7-8700K

Back in June 2017, when AMD launched its Zen architecture-based Ryzen chips out into the wild, they were promising a price-to-performance ratio that would finally dethrone Intel. However, at least with the initial Ryzen chips, AMD fell short of Intel in sheer horsepower – until the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X. This block of silicon wasn’t just a better value than Intel’s Core i9-7900X, but it was also a lot more versatile – able to easily be anchored into any x399 motherboard.

Read the full review: AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that with its mid-range chip, AMD offers more cores for less money when compared to Intel. While in year’s past this has equated to making compromises in other areas to keep the costs low, the Ryzen 5 1600X remains economical without being shown up. After all, operating with six cores and 12 threads, there’s no shame in a 3.6GHz base frequency, not to mention the 4.0GHz boost in addition to overclocking capabilities.

Read the full review: AMD Ryzen 5 1600X

Many people will assume that because it requires discrete GPU to use, the AMD Ryzen 3 1300X is built solely for gaming. Once you drop your assumptions, though, you’ll see it as the little processor that could. That’s because, at a price that’s the definition of reasonable, you’re getting a chip that’s 53% faster at encoding video than the Intel Core i3-7350K in Handbrake and – with the right GPU attached – can easily help you attain 60 frames per second in Overwatch.

Read the full review: AMD Ryzen 3 1300X

Like the 7700K that preceded it on this list, the Intel Core i5-7600K is an unlocked, overclockable quad-core processor from Intel. However, it also suffers from the same integral shortcoming; that is that it’s barely an upgrade over the i5-6600K. Be that as it may, squeezing out only 300MHz over its precursor brings it nearly in line with the last-gen Core i7-6700K when overclocked. All the while, it won’t put too much of a dent in your budget either.

The primary contender to Intel’s Core i7-7700K, the AMD Ryzen 7 1800X poses a convincing threat to Intel’s flagship. While it’s unfortunately more expensive than the 7700K, uncharacteristic for the oft value-focused Red Team, the Ryzen 7 1800X most certainly keeps up with some of Intel’s older chips. Plus, unlike the Core i7-5960X and -6700K it most intimately rivals, the AMD Ryzen 7 1800X is much more qualified for VR now and into the future.

Read the full review: AMD Ryzen 7 1800X

The naming convention is confusing, given that the Intel Core i7-7820X is part of Intel’s “Skylake-X” series rather than the X-class chips built on the 14nm Kaby Lake node, but semantics matter very little when you get to go hands-on with an Intel CPU boasting this many cores. Although the fact that you’ll need a new motherboard to use this octa-core monster might be enough to scare some users off to Ryzen, Intel loyalists shan’t mind the upgrade.

Intel's 18-core processor is all about brute force. With the ability to kick up all of its cores to 4.8GHz (by our testing at least), this monstrous CPU brings performance to a new level of insanity. The only caveats are this processor power draw and price are equally beastly.

Read the full review: Intel Core i9-7980XE

With the amount of money you’ll save by purchasing the Intel Pentium G4560 over a Core i3 chip, we promise you won’t mind the ever-so-slight loss in performance you can expect from this hardy value chip. As the first Pentium processor in quite some time to feature hyper-threading, the G4560 goes out of its way to show us all what we’ve been missing. And, in benchmarks, it proves itself eerily adjacent to the more expensive Intel Core i3-7100.

One of the things that held AMD’s Ryzen line of processors back at launch was the fact that even the best processors didn’t support integrated graphics, limiting their appeal to PC enthusiasts. However, with the Ryzen 5 2400G, that’s all changed. Packing impressive Vega graphics, it’s truly a groundbreaking APU that’s great for anyone who’s looking to build a PC for multimedia viewing. The Vega graphics are so good that even Intel wanted a piece of the action, after all. So if you want to stream all the 4K content available without purchasing a discrete GPU, the Ryzen 5 2400G is right up your alley.

Read the full review: AMD Ryzen 5 2400G