The winner of the PC Gamer Hardware Award for the best gaming CPU will be announced on New Year's Eve. It's obvious that AMD will win again this year, but as to which one gets all the glory, you'll just have to wait and see. Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.

At CES 2026 AMD formally announced the new Ryzen 7 9850X3D CPU for PC gamers, delivering even more performance than the Ryzen 7 9800X3D.

Much of the non-graphics aspects of Panther Lake include a lot of optimizations over previous generations, plus a move to Intel's smaller (2nm) 18A process node, which should result in the relevant chips being better overall, drawing notably less power. The first systems incorporating the 3 Series processors begin shipping immediately.

It's not the first Zen 5 X3D processor that AMD has released that's faster than the 9800X3D, though. The Ryzen 9 9950X3D has two core chiplets (CCDs), one with 3D V-cache, and one without. When it comes to boost clocks, the latter can hit 5.7 GHz, whereas the former topped out at 5.5 GHz in the tests I carried out in my review of the 9950X3D.

With eight cores, AMD's game-changing 3D V-Cache tech, and boosted clock speed the Ryzen 7 9850X3D is set to take the frame rate crown.

What it is Marked down by $700, the Alienware Area-51 Gaming Desktop PC pairs an Intel Core Ultra 7 265K processor with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti 16GB GPU. This configuration includes 32GB of

CPU usage is a measure of how much work the processor is doing, which varies depending on the specifications of the CPU. CPUs with more power will have a greater percentage of CPU usage. Having more cores on your CPU is beneficial, as is having more threads.

The Asus ROG G1000 gaming PC will house up to an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 and uses an external radiator to cool its CPU.