

The 10600K combines well with Z490 for its overclocking support, discussed later, and is a good tuning base that can reach performance levels AMD can’t yet claim. The 3600 is plenty capable to game, but if you really only care about gaming and don’t use workstation applications, the 10600K makes the most sense. Although the R5 3600 may be more well-rounded, particularly at its price-point, the 10600K is often within 4-5% of production-level performance of the 3600, while managing potentially significantly higher framerates. This one, we think, redeems the i5 lineup and is the most compelling buy for someone heavily focused on gaming performance, maybe even with a minor, non-daily focus on video production, 3D modeling, or similar. The 10600K is a genuine leap for Intel, which has been stuck for multiple generations on unsellable i5 CPUs. That’s not to discredit the 10900K, but we’ll come back to that. We have good reasons, the first of which is that it can achieve 10900K levels of performance with an overclock, particularly when considering the inevitable GPU bottleneck in many games. Intel’s new Core i5-10600K is the one we’re giving “Best Gaming,” despite the 10900K running higher performance stock.

Intel i9-10900K CPU Review (article) ( YouTube).If you want additional resources on any individual CPU, including a more data-centric approach, we’ve linked our reviews below.


For that, you’ll want to see the standalone reviews. A few charts will be included from various reviews, but some may be from older content and so might not be ‘compatible’ between test methodologies for direct comparison chart-to-chart. Our reviews and recommendations aren’t influenced by this. CPUs are linked to retailers, from whom we may receive a commission for the sale, as is standard at this point. Recent reviews will be linked below to help get to more details. This round-up will offer the only form of shortcut we ever publish, helping to cut through the heart of the hours of content we’ve published over the last few months. We’re not going to run this one as data-heavy as our reviews, so if you’re after really detailed information and all the charts and CPU benchmarks possible, check the individual reviews. This content is intended to be a simpler buyer’s guide to the best CPUs in 2020 (so far).
