If you’re a gamer who wants ultimate power or someone who works and plays hard on the same machine, these are the chips for you. For everyone else, buying one of the other chips on this list and investing more in a better graphics card would likely be a smarter move.

Both Intel and AMD have some amazing offerings in this category, from the Intel 9980XE, to AMD’s flagship second-generation Threadripper 2990WX with its ludicrous 32-cores and 64 threads. Those would be complete overkill for even this category though, as no consumer applications can really benefit from such multi-threaded performance.

With that in mind, we’d recommend either the Intel Core i9 9900k or the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1900X if you’re looking to stream and game.

The Intel Core i9-9900K is the real standout in this category as it beat out AMD Threadripper chips in our testing and offers amazing performance for both gaming and multi-threaded tests. The 9900K is by far the more capable chip.

Where the Threadripper alternatives offer more cores and threads for enhanced multithreading performance in certain applications, the 9900K’s eight cores and 16 threads give it more than enough to get on with and its super-high clock speeds mean it dominates just about anything out there in limited-thread scenarios.

The 9900K is arguably the best CPU in the world for gamers and even some more intensive computing tasks too.

Best processor for streaming and gaming: Intel Core i9-9900K

Budget gaming today doesn’t mean poor performance as there are some powerful options even at the low end of Intel and AMD’s lineups. Intel’s Core i5-9400F is one of the most affordable gaming processors it’s released in years. It ups the ante of traditional Core i5 chips with six cores, and though it doesn’t have hyperthreading, six threads are plenty to work with especially when it can hit 4.1 GHz with Intel Max Turbo.

AMD’s Ryzen 7 3800X, however, is arguably the more capable of the two chips. It has the same six cores as the Intel chip, but with simultaneous multithreading, it has support for up to 12 threads. Its boost clock is higher too, and with the Zen 2 gains in instructions per clock, it should outpace the 9400F by 10-15% in games.

It also dominates the 9400F in multithreaded productivity workloads, so if you want to work and game with your new CPU, the 3800X will be far more capable.

It’s not really worth looking last-generation, especially when it comes to gaming.

Best processor for gaming on a budget: AMD Ryzen 7 3800X

Thanks to AMD’s Ryzen CPUs lighting a fire under Intel, the current crop of mainstream CPUs are some of the best gaming chips we’ve seen in years. Better yet, they’re affordable. You can have some of the best chips from both companies for a reasonable price, so if you’re looking for top-gaming performance without breaking the bank, these are your best bets.

Both Intel’s Core i7-9700K and AMD’s Ryzen 7 3700X are amazing gaming chips that can go blow for blow in most games. While the Intel CPU might pip the 3700X in the odd game, they’re pretty comparable when it comes to frame rates. Outside of games, the simultaneous multi-threading support with the 3700X gives it a huge edge, often delivering big performance gains in video rendering and Photoshop tasks.

Thanks to big efficiency improvements in AMD’s Zen 2 architecture and its 7nm die shrink too, the 3700X is a far more efficient processor, requiring just 65 watts when boosting. The Intel chip on the other hand, can draw as much as 95 watts when it’s at its base frequency.

You could also consider the Intel 8700K, which has hyperthreading (supporting 16 threads) and that gives it an advantage in multithreaded workloads over the 9700K, but it’s not quite as quick in games.There are a number of motherboard options available to the AMD Ryzen 3700X as AMD’s AM4 socket works across multiple generations of chips and boards. The only real reason to opt for the x570 platform is if you want support for PCIe 4.0 storage drives. Otherwise the x470 and B450 boards should be fine, but make sure that you update the BIOS (use an AMD bootkit if needed) as otherwise the new chip may not work.

If you want an alternative AMD option, the last-generation 2700Xis still an excellent gaming chip. It has the same eight cores and 16-threads as the 3700X. It isn’t going to be as good as the 3700X in games, as the Zen+ architecture doesn’t have the same clock speed and instructions per clock improvements.

Best processor for mid-level gaming: AMD Ryzen 3700X