Postscript We were initially going to look at both Christmas movies in the series, b

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All of today's consumer, desktop CPUs compared

Your CPU has a huge effect on overall performance and, to many, is a computer's most important component. But when it comes time to buying a CPU for your desktop, you'll find a dizzying collection of model numbers and specs from both Intel and AMD. We've listed our the best CPUs for gaming and best processors for work in other articles, but if you want to know how each chip stacks up against all the others and how we come to our decisions, this CPU Hierarchy is for you. We also recently added a new article covering the CPU hierarchy for Cyberpunk 2077, which is a dedicated piece to show performance scaling in the most hotly-anticipated game in recent history. 

We recently added the Ryzen 5 5600X, Ryzen 9 5950X, 5900X, and Ryzen 7 5800X to our rankings, along with all of the previous-gen Zen 3, Zen+, and Zen 1 versions of those chips. These new processors represent a watershed moment for AMD: The company has swept our benchmark hierarchy and taken the lead in every metric, including our gaming, single-threaded, and multi-threaded categories.

We are busily retesting our full arsenal of processors. We will re-rank them with our latest tests and hardware, but for now, we have split the latest results for each category (gaming, single-threaded, and multi-threaded) into two different listings. One is listed as "Post-Zen 3," and the other is listed as "Pre-Zen 3." 

We're using different tests and a newer version of Windows 10 to measure performance in the new rankings, so the two lists aren't directly comparable. This applies doubly-so for the gaming hierarchy, as we are now using an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090 for gaming tests, which is significantly faster than the old 2080 Ti we used previously. For now, we've only tested 21 processors in the Post-Zen 3 era, but you can use the old table of results to get a rough sense of how the newly-tested processors compare to the un-retested models.     

We'll transition to a single table for each category once we've reached a tipping point in the number of processors tested. We're working on that endeavor full time.    

We'll explain how we ranked the processors under each table. The game testing ranking is first. We also include an application performance metric in our application score tables, which we've split up into single- and multi-core measurements (below gaming table). Make sure to check the Post-Zen 3 rankings for all three categories. 

The most powerful chip gets a 100, and all others are scored relative to it. If you want our recommendations for specific price bands, please check out our Best CPUs for gaming page.
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