General consumer processor market live a golden momentAnd thanks to the “war” that AMD and Intel are waging, today it is possible to find very powerful chips with very competitive prices. So, for example, right now we have the Ryzen 5 5500 for only 135 euros, which is an excellent price for this 6-core, 12-thread chip, and we can also get the Core i3-12100F from 105 euros, a price that is also very good if we consider considering its enormous single-wire performance.

More competition is always good for consumers as it usually represents a greater variety of products at very attractive prices, although this has an important counterpart in having more processors to choose from decision making is complex. Buying the most powerful processor is not always the best decision, in fact the ones with the best price/performance ratio are usually the ones in the middle range, so we have to be very careful in this regard. We have already discussed this in detail in this guide.

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All in all, the lists are ordered by the performance that Tom’s Hardware shares, and the updates are always a big help, as they allow us to be clear about which are the most powerful chips and allow us to compare and appreciate the differences in performance that exist. between the cheapest and the most expensive. In single-wire design We can see this on the attached graph Ryzen 7 5800X3D leads classification, and that would be in second place Core i9-12900KS at stock frequencies (make no mistake, this list includes overclocked models in the classification, which makes correct interpretation a bit difficult).

Bronze goes to Core i9-12900K, fourth and fifth place goes to Core i7-12700K and Ryzen 9 5950X. It’s surprising how well the Core i5-12400 is placed with DDR4 memory at 3800 MHz, as it is able to outperform the Ryzen 7 5800X, a chip that is much more expensive. There are no surprises at the bottom of the list, and we see Core Gen10 (Comet Lake-S) and Ryzen 3000 (Zen 2) processors occupying the last places.

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We find some interesting results in multi-threaded performance. The Core i9-12900KS leads the way down followed by the Core i9-12900K, although the differences are not too big and the Ryzen 9 5950X is able to outperform the latter if overclocked. The thing is very tight, and this is a clear example of the good work that Intel has done with the high-performance cores present in the Core Gen12 (Alder Lake-S).

The Ryzen 7 5800X3D loses a lot of places in the multi-threaded tests and falls short of the Ryzen 7 5800X as well as the Core i5-12600K. The Core i5-12400 with 3,800 MHz DDR4 memory is dangerously close to the Ryzen 7 5700X, a chip that has two cores and four extra threads. There are no surprises at the bottom of the table, the quad-core, eight-thread chips are ranked last, although The Core i3-12100 is not far behind the Ryzen 5 3600.