Intel’s top 6 best processors for 2024

When choosing the best processor for your PC, Intel offers serious performance and gaming competition to AMD’s Ryzen 7000 and Ryzen 9000 processors. And, to win this race, Intel needs a little more power.

And, to win this race, Intel needs a little more power.

Although the Core Ultra 9 285K — is the latest flagship processor, it falls just a little short of the flagships. There are plenty of processors we’d recommend instead, and they’re all featured here as part of the best Intel processors you can buy in 2024.

All of them are here as part of the best Intel processors you can buy in 2024.

Note: There are some reports that the Core i9-13900K and Core i9-14900K have stability issues. This information is being verified, but it’s worth considering.

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Intel Core i5-13600K

The dilemma between Core i5 and Core i7 is always present in Intel processors, but the Core i5-13600K has changed that trend. It’s much cheaper than the 14700K and still offers similar performance in both basic work tasks and gaming. In some cases, it even beats the flagship Core i9-13900K, making it one of the best processors you can buy right now.

The Core i5-13600K is the best processor you can buy right now.

It even competes with the new 265K and 285K generations in gaming, which is embarrassing for Intel but great for budget gamers.

For about 35,000 rubles, you get a 14-core processor clocked up to 5.1GHz. However, not all of those 14 cores are built the same. Like the previous generation of processors, the Core i5-13600K combines performance (P) and efficiency (E) cores. In the Core i5-13600K, you get six P cores and eight E cores.

The Core i5-13600K is the only processor that has both P and E cores.

Six P cores are more than enough for gaming, allowing the Core i5-13600K to compete with AMD’s Ryzen 5 7600X at a similar price point. However, it’s the additional E cores that Intel pulls ahead, offering the best multi-core performance in demanding tasks like video encoding and rendering.

The Core i5-13600K’s six P cores are more than enough for gaming, allowing it to compete with AMD’s Ryzen 5 7600X.

Intel Core i5-13400F

After major releases, Intel always releases more budget-friendly variants, and unfortunately, they don’t always get the attention they deserve. That’s not the case with the Core i5-13400F. For 20,000 rubles you get a very powerful processor for gaming and other tasks.

This processor belongs to the 13th generation, which can’t be called cutting edge, but don’t let that scare you. The Core i5-13400F utilizes six performance cores and four efficient cores, giving you high multi-threading performance at a good price.

The Core i5-13400F is a very powerful processor for gaming and other tasks.

It’s in gaming that this chip performs best, often losing only 5-10% to the more expensive Core i5-13600K. You can push the processor even further by removing the power limit, allowing it to rival even the Core i9-12900K of a few generations ago.

And you can take it even further by removing the power limit, allowing it to compete even with the Core i9-12900K of a few generations ago.

There are a couple of nuances, though. For starters, it doesn’t support overclocking, but you can remove the power limit to increase performance. It also doesn’t have integrated graphics, so you’ll have to pair the processor with a graphics card.

Intel Core i9-14900K

Core i9-14900K —s an upgrade, and as such, it doesn’t offer major performance improvements over the Core i9-13900K discussed next. For most people, the Core i9-13900K is still the processor to buy. However, if you want absolute gaming performance, the Core i9-14900K is a great choice. The 285K may be newer, but it underperforms in too many games.

The Core i9-13900K is a great choice.

The 14900K is close to the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D in gaming performance, and weaker performance tasks like compression perform better with the newer 14th-gen chips. However, areas such as rendering and transcoding remain largely unchanged from the previous generation.

The 14900K’s performance is similar to that of the previous generation.

This chip does not have an upgrade option, however. The next time you upgrade, you’ll need a new motherboard.

So you’ll need a new motherboard.

The cost is about 70,000 rubles.

Intel Core i9-13900K

The best Intel processor on the market right now isn’t the Arrow Lake flagships or even the top-of-the-line 14th-generation models, but the Core i9-13900K, and that’s surprising because it’s not even the most expensive. No, it’s still an expensive chip, of course, but the Core i9-13900K manages to outperform the rival AMD Ryzen 9 7950X while offering better performance in most cases.

Not the least part of this advantage is that the Core i9-13900K has 24 cores. You get eight P-core cores and 16 E-core cores, giving you a total of 32 threads to work with. Even more impressive is that the processor can overclock up to 5.8GHz, offering some of the highest clock speeds among desktop CPUs at the moment.

The Core i9-13900K is also capable of overclocking up to 5.8GHz, offering some of the highest clock speeds among desktop CPUs at the moment.

Despite the 13th-generation Raptor Lake architecture, you can still use older 600-series motherboards and DDR4 memory with the Core i9-13900K. This makes it a much more attractive (and cheaper) upgrade option.

The Core i9-13900K can still be used with older 600-series motherboards and DDR4 memory.

The only downside to the Core i9-13900K is that it’s too powerful. It gets very hot and consumes a lot of power, and in gaming tasks, the cheaper Core i5-13600K offers almost identical performance. However, if you need peak power, nothing beats the Core i9-13900K.

The Core i9-13900K is a good choice.

Cost is around 65,000 rubles.

Intel Core i3-12100F

It’s not among the latest generations of Intel chips, but at a price point of around 10,000 rubles, the 12100F —s a great buy for not particularly demanding games and basic performance.

Equipped with four cores and eight threads, and clocked up to 4.3 GHz. In general, this processor stands out a bit in the Alder Lake lineup, as it doesn’t have a hybrid architecture and uses only P-core. However, that doesn’t make it unusable at all, and it will handle both simple games and a variety of everyday tasks.

Intel Core Ultra 9 285K

Intel Core Ultra 9 285K is an impressive processor, but not everything about it is perfect. That’s a fair point, because while it pulls ahead in many professional and creative applications, it performs far worse in gaming than the best processors of recent years.

Intel’s Core Ultra 9 285K is an impressive processor, but it’s not perfect.

This is partly because it has a new chip design with a new architecture and no simultaneous multithreading. As it is, it makes full use of those cores, delivering amazing performance across a wide range of applications. It’s also much more efficient than Intel’s latest flagships, which is nothing short of amazing.

And it’s much more efficient than Intel’s latest flagships.

It’s not the best processor for gaming, however. While it’s fast in some games, it’s much slower in others, and AMD’s gaming processors outperform it.

And it’s not the best processor for gaming.

Cost is around 90,000 rubles.