New PC Gamer Hardware Awards: The Best Gaming CPU Of 2025

It's another slam dunk for AMD, of course, but that doesn't mean there's an obvious winner.

Check out more of the year's best tech in our PC Gamer Hardware Awards 2025 coverage.

It's been a relatively quiet year for new gaming CPUs, as AMD and Intel launched the bulk of their latest processors back in 2024. Ryzen 9000-series chips first appeared in the summer, with the Core Ultra 200S range making an appearance a few months later in October.

Since then, retailers' listings have mostly been filled with non-overclockable or low-power versions, but AMD did drop a few niceties for us in 2025. Admittedly, most of them weren't much of a surprise, as the Ryzen 9 9950X3D was expected right from the launch of Zen 5.

And the same is somewhat true of the Ryzen AI Max and Max+ processors, better known as Strix Halo. AMD announced them at CES, and we didn't have to wait too long before we saw mighty APUs in use in the Framework Desktop and even in some handhelds.

The real surprise was the Ryzen 5 7500X3D. Basically just a cut-down Ryzen 7 7800X3D, it pretty much popped out of nowhere in November, and given that AMD had already launched the Ryzen 5 7600X3D in August, few folks expected another version of it (we're still waiting for a Zen 4 version of the Ryzen 7 5700X3D).

Intel did launch its Panther Lake mobile processor architecture in October, but the chips themselves won't be available until after the official launch at CES 2026. Team Blue chipped away at improving Arrow Lake, but fresh desktop processors are for next year only.

So while 2025 hasn't been an outstanding year for new gaming CPUs, there are three that are more than good enough to warrant special attention for a PC Gamer Hardware award.

AMD Ryzen 5 7500X3DTake a Ryzen 7 7800X3D gaming CPU, disable two cores, and lower the clocks a bit and what do you have? Answer: a Ryzen 5 7600X3D. Now take that chip and lower the clocks a teensy bit more, and you get this, the lovely little Ryzen 5 7500X3D.With six Zen 4 cores, 12 threads, and a boost clock of 4.5 GHz, it's not a processor that would normally make you sit up and pay attention. Especially when you learn that its price tag is around $269.Its secret sauce is, as the name points out, the slice of 3D V-cache bonding to the top of the cores. Thanks to the enormous 96 MB of L3 cache, it's a superb little gaming chip and surprisingly, not massively slower than the 7800X3D.Sure, it's pricey for a six-core chip, but when it uses just 65 W of power, you

Source: PC Gamer