Is the AMD Ryzen 9 5900X the best CPU for games?

Best answer: Yes, the AMD Ryzen 9 5900X is an excellent choice for gaming, if a bit pricey. Its 12 cores might be a little overkill for gaming, but its raw processing speed puts it at the top against any and all competition.

Why is the AMD Ryzen 9 5900X good for gaming?

The biggest reason the AMD Ryzen 9 5900X is good for gaming is one thing: It's incredibly fast. A lot of computer processors are fast, but the AMD Ryzen 9 5900X is the kind of fast that's made to make your games run well. A lot of it comes down to the way the processor is built. Unlike its Intel competition, the AMD Ryzen 9 5900X tightens the design so that each of its 12 cores has an easier time accessing information. Because of that, your games will run smoother, especially if they're not particularly core-hungry. There's a reason AMD's processors are incredibly popular even in laptops.

This is notable, because the processor itself has a lot more cores than you really need for most games. For most people, 12 cores is pointless for gaming, but it's how they're designed that matters when it comes to how quickly your graphics card can render out frames of your beautiful game on your monitor. This gets even more important if you're someone who plays on a 1440p or 4K monitor at frame rates above 60 per second.

What makes the AMD Ryzen 9 5900X faster for gaming?

Without wading into the swamp of technical details about the complex ways processors interact with your RAM and GPU to run your games, all you need to know is that the AMD Ryzen 9 5900X makes particular design choices that increase the overall speeds compared to previous iterations and Intel's offerings. Specifically, it's the way each core is physically closer to each other and the L3 cache, providing more efficient ways to grab information. This leads to the AMD Ryzen 9 5900X having a faster IPC, or instructions per clock, than its clock speed might imply.

It's the main reason the AMD Ryzen 9 5900X is good for gaming, and frankly, a lot of other intensive operations. Without this specific design choice, the cores would take longer to render a game and those delays could add up to a noticeable lack in performance. The AMD Ryzen 9 5900X is unique because it's built to fuel your PC when it's trying to run a demanding game.

How hard is it to buy an AMD Ryzen 9 5900X?

Here's the biggest catch about the AMD Ryzen 9 5900X when it comes to gaming and, well, everything. It's incredibly hard to get still. In part because of the state of the world and because a ton of people really wanted to build powerful PCs lately, the AMD Ryzen 9 5900X is a really, really tough chip to get. It's also expensive, coming in at $50 MSRP (a price you won't see a ton still because of the intense demand) over the last generation's high-end option.

That puts it at $549 which is pretty steep, especially when the gains aren't huge if you already have a previous Ryzen CPU. At the same time though, if you want to future-proof yourself, it's close to competitive pricing for anything close to its power out there.

Our pick

AMD Ryzen 9 5900X

$675 at Amazon

If you need to play the latest games on a powerhouse processor, this is it

AMD Ryzen 9 5900X outperforms the competition because it's built with gaming in mind. This 12-core processor does almost everything exceptionally well.