🛑STOP🛑 Buying Bad Combos! Best CPU and GPU Combo 2023

stop buying bad CPU and GPU combos let's get you the best CPU and GPU combo in 2023. hi welcome back to PC Builder I'm Jason 2023 is a great time to build a PC as PC ports prices have absolutely crashed especially Ram ssds CPUs and yes even gpus but I still see so many people missing out on the best CPU and GPU combo for gaming and productivity now the reason simple it's hard enough to understand the best CPU for gaming and the best GPU for gaming by themselves combining them together it's even harder so today we'll cover everything that you need to know and we'll give you specific recommendations at every budget level to get you the best CPU and GPU combo for gaming 2023. remember if you get value out of the video please give it a like because it really helps out the channel and of course subscribe and click that Bell icon that way you get notified when we release cool content with that let's jump into it the first thing to understand is bottlenecking now bottlenecking just means that one of our components is limiting our performance and if we could upgrade that component to make it faster than our overall system performance would increase now the bottleneck that occurs most often for PC builds is the CPU versus the GPU so if our CPU is too slow to keep up with our GPU then increasing the speed of the CPU would give us more FPS if our GPU is our bottleneck then getting a faster GPU instead would increase our performance note that the CPU is more likely to bottleneck when we're pushing huge amounts of frames and our GPU is likely to be the bottleneck when we turn up the resolution from 1080p to 1440p to 4K including if the GPU does not have enough vram to run the latest AAA titles on release at higher ultra settings as we've seen from recent games like The Last of Us Part 1 Hogwarts Legacy for spoken and others but here's the thing that even experienced PC builders get wrong no matter what our system will always have a bottleneck it's our job as PC Builders to understand how to maximize our system performance whether that's in gaming streaming video editing or heavy multi-threaded workloads once we figure that out we want to spend most of our budget on the component that's bottlenecking our performance for gaming we want to maximize our FPS or frames per second that means getting the fastest GPU we can afford while only spending enough on a CPU that will not bottleneck the graphics card this depends on your budget and the less you have to spend the more important it is to get the balance right obviously if you have an unlimited budget you'll just get the best of everything and spend around four thousand dollars for the ultimate gaming system but most of you out there have a set amount of money that you can spend so choosing the best CPU and GPU combo will heavily impact your gaming performance remember that as we go up in CPU core count we also need to add more Cooling and especially for Intel CPUs we need to buy a better motherboard which also costs more money along with the price differences between ddr4 and ddr5 RAM so we'll take all of this into consideration for example say we want to build a gaming PC with a ryzen 5600 CPU and a Radeon RX 6600 XT 8 gigabyte GPU and we decided to increase our budget another 100 where should we spend it now we could upgrade the CPU to ryzen 7600 which overall is quite a bit faster than the ryzen 5600 but at this GPU performance level it's only going to give us slightly more FPS because our GPU is the bottleneck not the CPU so we just spent our extra 100 on the ryzen 7600 not to mention more on the ddr5 ram as well for about a five percent increase in fps not great instead if we spent that extra 100 to jump up to an RX 6700 XT 12 gigabyte GPU and we keep Horizon 5600 CPU we'll pick up about 25 percent more FPS because we're spending our money smartly by upgrading the part that's bottlenecking our performance we'll also jump up from 8GB gigabytes of vram on our GPU to 12 gigabytes of vram which ensures we can run all the latest AAA titles on release with ultra settings and not run into any vram issues and remember that as we go up in resolution from 1080p to 1440p to 4K that increases the load on the GPU and it decreases load on the CPU so it makes more sense to upgrade the GPU when considering bottlenecks there are two important areas to consider the first is vram the amount of video RAM on your GPU as we've already discussed and we go over in much more detail in our best GPU for gaming 2023 video which we'll leave linked down in the video description now while budget GPU Shoppers you're likely going to have to contend with eight gigabytes of vram I recommend moving up to at least 10 or 12 gigabyte gpus if your budget will stretch that far and I would prioritize this over a slightly faster GPU with only 8 gigabytes of vram and I'm looking at you RTX 4060 and 4060 TI this second thing to consider is GPU driver overhead we've seen repeated testing that AMD gpus require less CPU resources than Nvidia gpus it seems to just come down to driver overhead while the difference is they're not huge they are noticeable with lesser CPUs so we've taken that into account in our recommendations let's talk briefly about future proofing because this is an area I often see so many CPU and GPU combo mistakes some people still think that you should future proof your CPU by buying a faster one than you need right now so that in two to five years time when you do upgrade your GPU you get slightly more FPS out of it in my opinion while there are some decisions like this to be made at the ultra budget level and the very high end for most systems in between this strategy would mean sacrificing an entire GPU tier's worth and performance right now so for instance getting an RX 6600 XT instead of a much faster rx6700xt so the future proofing strategy cost you FPS right now to maybe get slightly more FPS in two to five years time in the end this is your call because after all it's your money but if you want to maximize FPS for your money spent then focus on maximizing current performance but what about production or creator workloads that need more CPU power well for those use cases we want more balance but it depends heavily on the types of programs that we're using take video editing in Adobe Premiere for example well going up from four cores is nice Premiere still tends to max out on how many CPU cores and threads it will use it once so going overkill on your CPU at the expense of your GPU which is still very much needed for video editing might actually set your performance back meanwhile other programs can use all the CPU resource you can throw at them and they don't really use the GPU very much at all that is why it's so important for professional users to understand their Suite of software programs and the recommended system requirements so that you can figure out the right CPU and GPU balance for your application let's jump into our recommendations for best CPU and GPU combo for gaming in 2023 and we'll go through both AMD ryzen as well as Intel CPU offerings note that we are expecting 14 gen Intel CPUs to begin launching sometime in early fall of this year we do a monthly update video for both CPU and GPU pricing so I'll leave those linked down in the video description and of course all the CPU and gpus that I'm going to talk about are linked there as well so you can check current pricing starting off at the budget level you can build a gaming PC right now for just under 500 U.S now at this level we really want the cheapest CPU platform that just won't bottleneck our GPU right now Intel's I3 1200f and the ryzen 5500 they're both excellent options paired with the inexpensive motherboards a 100 b660 for the I3 1200f and an 80 b450 with bios flashback for the ryzen 5500 they both come with very good included CPU coolers and we're using both with a 50 kit of 2x8 gigabyte ddr4 3600 cl16 Ram though you can get a 30 kit of 3200 CL 16 if it helps you improve your GPU the total cost of these platforms is between 220 and 239 dollars for our GPU we could go all the way down to a used RX 570 for about 55 or on the new market a Radeon RX 6600 for 179 an RTX 3050 for 220 or an Intel Arc a750 GPU for about 220 dollars note the RTX 3050 is considerably slower than those other gpus and my advice is to avoid any GPU with less than 8 gigabytes of vram both the I3 1200f and ryzen 5500 they're very capable gaming CPUs and you can push them all the way to an RX 6700 XT or RTX 3060 TI performance possibly a little higher if you can get a good deal on a GPU but don't have the money to upgrade the CPU here I would prioritize getting to a recent GPU with more than eight gigabytes of vram if you can and if you want to play the latest triple lay titles on release at ultra settings so the RX 6700 10 gigabyte non-xt version the 6700 XD 12 gigabyte RTX 3060 12 gigabyte or the arc a770 16 gigabyte they're all viable options the next CPU tier up I would look at is either the AMD ryzen 5600 for 130 or the Intel i5 12400f currently selling for 149. now these CPUs have nearly identical performance and with a GPU like the RX 6700 XT we'll see about a 10 to 12 FPS increase over the previous tier of CPUs I'll leave links to our build guides for both down in the video description and in particular the I5 12400 it can be a little tricky as some of the cheaper b660 motherboards they don't run it at the full rated frequency so we do go through which ones to get currently a board like the MSI Pro b660m-a or b660m aorus Pro ax silver right around 120 dollars for the ryzen 5600 virtually any beef 550 motherboard with a vrm heatsink is absolutely fine so something like the b550m ds3hac ASRock b550m Riptide or the b550m Pro 4 with upgraded audio is great for about a hundred dollars we're using the same ddr4 3600 cl16 Ram kit for 50 and both CPUs come with a great included box cooler this gives us an upgrade cost of between 59 and 99 over our previous tier of gpus for our GPU combo I'd look at a minimum of an RX 6600 RTX 3050 or Arc a750 new gpus these CPUs scale pretty well but they do hit a wall right around the RX 6950 XT or RTX 4070 and at that point you'll definitely want to jump up to the next tier of CPU performance note that if you do need more cores for productivity you can consider the ryzen 5700x or Intel i5 13400 possibly even the 13500 but they don't give much more gaming performance and there's much better options as we'll go over next jumping up to our mid-range to high-end gaming CPU and GPU combos we actually have quite a few options here with current pricing I feel that our best options are either the ryzen 7600 and 7600x for about 215 or a ddr4 ram equipped Intel i5 13600k or 13600 KF for about 290 we have build guides for both the ryzen 7600 and I5 13600k which cover things like the difference between the 7600 and 7600x as well as the 13600k versus the 13600 KF so check them out for more details these CPUs will give us about 25 percent more FPS using an RX 6950xt or RTX 4070 over the previous tier of CPUs the ryzen 7600 is the faster gaming CPU with the I5 13600k with ddr4 the stronger and multi-core production work for the ryzen 7600 we're using a budget Tower air cooler like the Deep cool ak-400 for about 30 dollars a budget b650 motherboard for about 140 and an 85 kit of 2 by 16 gigabyte so 32 gigabytes total of ddr5 5600 cl32 RAM for the I5 13600k we're using a ddr4 z690 motherboard with bios flashback for about 160 dollars z790 is fine as well but they tend to be more expensive a 2x8 gigabyte kit of ddr4 3600 cl16 for 50 and a mid-range air cooler like the thermal right Peerless assassin 120se for 45 dollars that makes our upgrade cost over the previous tier between 191 and 266 dollars for a GPU combo given how much we're spending on the CPU platform now we want a minimum of an RX 6700 XT or RTX 3060 TI both right around the 300 us Mark at the time of filming we can take either of these CPUs all the way up to the RX 7900 XTX or the RTX 4090 and at that point if we still have money left over in our budget our only option for more performance will be to upgrade the CPU because those are the fastest gpus that are currently available given the fact that amd's am5 ryzen 7000 platform will have future drop-in CPU upgrades it's a lot harder to recommend the I5 13600k at current pricing right now for about the same price as the I5 13600k platform you can get a ryzen 7700 instead if you need the extra CPU power for multi-threaded production work while still retaining that future upgrade ability I want to give a quick honorable mention to the ryzen 5800 X 3D at the time of filming the CPU it's down to 290 U.S and it's likely that price will keep on falling so if you're currently on the am4 platform with like a ryzen 1000 2000 or 3000 Series CPU heck even arrives in 5600 5800x the ryzen 5800x 3D will deliver similar performance to the ryzen 7600 in gaming often even beating it in really CPU intensive titles so if I had one of those older Rising and CPUs even if I had to upgrade my Ram kit to the 3600 cl16 one for fifty dollars so 340 in total that's potentially a very compelling upgrade now let's look at the current top tier of gaming CPUs in 2023. there are of course many options here but I think the most compelling option from AMD it's the ryzen 7800x 3D currently selling for 430 dollars check out our build guide for it linked in the video description and for Intel right now at least it's the i7 13700k running extremely fast and still very expensive ddr5 7200 cl34 Ram at the ultra high end of gpus like the RTX 4090 the ryzen 7800 X 3D and i7 13700k can sometimes bring enough lift of up to 20 percent in some very CPU intensive titles though at 1440p and 4K in many games were entirely GPU bound and we don't see much of an FPS increase at all overall the ryzen 7800x 3D is about eight to ten percent faster than the i7 13700k even when the i7 uses very fast ddr5 RAM for the ryzen 7800x 3D build we're using a mid-range to higher end air cooler like the thermal ride assassin 120 for 45 the same 140 b650 motherboard like the ASRock b650m Pro 4 Wi-Fi and the 85 kit of 2 by 16 gigabyte ddr5 5600 cl32 Ram though in our testing we found that due to the huge amount of V cash on the CPU that Ram speed just didn't matter very much and we got similar results with even cheaper ddr5 5200 cl40 RAM for the i7 13700k unfortunately ddr5 z690 and z790 motherboards run at least about 200 U.S and the 2 by 16 gigabyte dr5 7200 cl34 Kit currently runs for 170 dollars though ddr5 RAM prices they continue to drop that brings our upgrade cost for the 7800 x3d to 230 dollars over the previous C view tier and for the i7 13700k the upgrade cost is 340 more than the previous tier for our GPU combos for a minimum I'd recommend the Radeon RX 7900 XT currently selling for around 760 dollars or the RTX 4070 TI selling for about the same price ideally we'd want the fastest GPU possible so RX 7900 XTX for AMD currently selling for 950 and the currently 1600 RTX 4090 both CPU and GPU prices as well as RAM and other component prices they just continue to get cheaper in 2023 so remember to check out those links down in the video description for updated pricing and remember that while we exclusively focused on fpf performance today it's absolutely okay to spend money on other aspects of your PC build that bring you enjoyment if you got value out of the video please take a moment give it a like because it makes a huge difference to the channel and of course subscribe and click that Bell icon that way you get notified when we release cool content if you're looking for a deep dive into picking the best GPU for gaming 2023 then check out this video right here where we go through all the differences between AMD Nvidia and Intel gpus including features like FSR versus dlss versus xcss as well as questions like does it matter if you buy from gigabyte Asus MSI or someone else and everything else that you need to know to get the best GPU for gaming in 2023 and we'll catch you on the next one

Channel: PC Builder

Views: 1,090,601

Keywords:

Id: hRiSXgVL4VI

Length: 17min 28sec (1048 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 01 2023