All In One Gaming Pc Best Buy
HP's Envy 34 is one of the classiest showpieces in the all-in-one (AIO) arena. Its centerpiece is a gorgeous 34-inch widescreen display with 5K resolution that boosts your productivity by letting you arrange app windows to mimic a dual-monitor setup. HP's minimal stand belies this AIO's ample power, including Thunderbolt 4 ports and easily upgraded memory (RAM) and storage. (Like all AIO desktops, it's not a fire-breathing gaming rig, though mobile-grade Nvidia GeForce GPUs are available.)
all in one gaming pc best buy
Though it's not a concern to those with 20/10 vision, a larger screen and a higher native resolution will let you increase the font size on your Word documents or Excel spreadsheets while still keeping a lot of information on the screen at one time. Desktop screens tend to be brighter than laptop displays in general, as well. Look for in-plane switching (IPS) technology for the best screen quality. IPS screens are inherently better at off-axis viewing, which means you won't have to be sitting perfectly centered to see accurate colors and all the detail in your images.
You can have the best of both worlds with an all-in-one PC that boots from an SSD but has an additional spinning hard drive for storage. In that case, look for at least a 256GB SSD boot drive and 1TB of supplemental hard drive storage if you're a power user. You'll need more storage (2TB to 4TB) if you plan on keeping your entire video, music, and photo collection on your AIO.
But these PCs aren't just good for play. A few years back, Apple brought the AIO further into workstation territory with the iMac Pro. The starting price for this monster machine at launch was high at $5,000, but it packed a jaw-dropping amount of muscle: It has a 27-inch 5K screen and is configurable with up to an 18-core processor, 128GB of memory, and 4TB of solid-state storage. (Note that it is still for sale at this writing from non-Apple sources, often used or as a refurbished model, but as of March 2021, Apple discontinued the iMac Pro.) In most cases, this kind of muscle is found only in elite-grade tower PCs, but the very best AIOs can rival a high-end desktop.
The short answer is: yes. The longer answer is that it's more complicated and nuanced than that. You obviously need a CPU in your gaming PC, but the component that has the biggest impact on frame rates is your graphics card. That doesn't mean you can have a weak old processor in your rig and pair it with a high-end GPU and have no worries. You still need your processor to keep your graphics card fed with data to ensure a smooth gaming experience, without that you'll get stutters as the GPU waits for the CPU to catch up.
As with everything it's all about balance. But in modern times, a mainstream CPU won't see you losing out in terms of gaming performance compared to the top chips by anything more than single digit frames per second.
The honest answer is: no. Overclocking your processor is not necessarily the risky move it once was, but equally, the benefits of doing so have drastically dropped in recent times. When we're talking about gaming performance, having a slightly higher clocked CPU can make a bit of a difference, but arguably your graphics card will be the part that limits the speed of your system.
The best gaming CPU is one of the most hotly contested titles in the industry, changing hands with each successive new generation of processors. Right now, the ball's firmly in Intel's court, thanks to a clever hybrid architecture and some healthy pricing on its latest Raptor Lake 13th Gen chips, but AMD's Zen 4 is certainly no slouch.
AMD is also set to launch its new mega-cache X3D CPUs, too, which ought to give them a leg up in frame rates. Whether that will give AMD the title again remains to be seen. But the best CPU for gaming isn't all about raw frame rate metrics, because most of us game at resolutions where our graphics card is the dominant player in terms of deciding on game performance. So, maybe the best gaming CPU is the one which will support an RTX 4090 (opens in new tab) without breaking the bank.
The Intel Core i5 13600K is another mighty mid-range chip from Intel, and you can expect a major uplift in core counts even with this more parsimoniously priced Raptor Lake chip. Well-tuned to deliver high gaming frame rates, this is ultimately the chip most gamers should consider first for their next gaming PC.
Alright, real-life performance won't see the Core i5 13600K matching the Core i9 12900K in every regard, but it really does deliver something similar in gaming for a lot less money. In three out of six games I've tested, the Core i5 13600K matches the pace of the Core i9 12900K.
We're once again seeing the best gaming chip come from the lower rungs of the stack with Raptor Lake. The Core i5 13600K delivers exceptional gaming performance in a sensibly priced package, delivering only a handful of frames less than the processors that fetch double the asking price. For a gaming PC build in 2022/23, this is absolutely the chip I'd recommend to most.
For a gaming PC, there's no better value CPU than a Core i5. For most of 2022, we recommended the Core i5 12600K for the best gaming CPU (opens in new tab) and the Core i5 12400 as the best gaming CPU on a budget. Last year, the Core i5 13600K (opens in new tab) took over the top spot. And today, the Core i5 13400F pushes Alder Lake out of the running with an even more impressive specification for the money.
Yet even in these two games where the Core i5 13400F falls off the pace of the faster 13th Gen processors, it remains quicker than last year's best gaming CPU, the Core i5 12600K. It's also significantly faster than the Core i5 12400, though is more power-hungry for it.
Intel's platform is surprisingly cheap for the inclusion of both the latest 700-series motherboards and older 600-series motherboards. Similarly, we're saving a little cash here on the 'F' designated model. The 'F' denotes the Core i5 13400F's lack of integrated graphics, which isn't a deal breaker by any stretch of the imagination. Generally, that integrated GPU isn't going to come much in handy for gaming, and even today's cheapest discrete graphics card will outperform it by a country mile.
When it comes to gaming performance, the Core i9 13900K is equally impressive. This chip does little to hold back a modern high-end GPU, such as the RTX 3080 we're testing with, and I have no doubts it'll make the best pairing with Nvidia's new RTX 4090, too. Minimum and 1%/0.1% lows were also impressively high and consistently so, which is a good marker of CPU performance nowaday.
As an on-paper proposition, there's a heck of a lot to like about the new AMD Ryzen 7 7700. For starters, it's an eight-core, 16-thread chip which is plenty for gaming and almost anything else short of pro-level content creation.
It's not faster for gaming, of course, but it's close enough that your choice of graphics driver version is almost certainly more important than whether you have a Ryzen 7 7700 or 7700X installed. The gap is that small.
Either way, of course, you're getting a great gaming chip. In fact, if you're restricting the comparison to AMD options, it's an absolute no brainer to go with this non-X model. That's especially true when you consider the fact that it's fully unlocked.
Of course, being an easy choice over the X-model doesn't make this the best CPU at the $329 price point. There's the monitor matter of the Intel Core i5 13600K (opens in new tab)(opens in new tab). As a gaming chip, the 13600K will generally be quicker.
A lot then will come down to your personal needs and also issues like motherboard pricing. This new AMD CPU is a great gaming chip, for sure. Actually in-game, you'd never feel the difference compared with the slightly faster Intel option, it's that close. But as an all-round CPU, that tricksy Intel hybrid architecture still has the edge.
The AMD Ryzen 9 7950X is the vanguard for a whole new generation of CPUs and GPUs launching in these next few months. But, despite its many advances, a whole new AM5 motherboard platform, and shiny new heatspreader design, this isn't the best gaming CPU (opens in new tab) we were hoping for.
But does fast and hot make it the ultimate gaming processor? Not really, not at all in fact. On that score, it will often get outperformed by the eight-core Ryzen 7 7700X which launches alongside it. It is comfortably faster than the previous generation's Ryzen 9 5950X, which is important, especially as that was priced some $100 higher on release.
At launch, the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D was the fastest gaming processor the red team had ever made. It's not so much anymore, but it remains the best bet for gaming performance if you're stuck with an AM4 motherboard.
AMD's chip was and still is a technically impressive beast, using the latest packaging processes from TSMC to bung an inordinate amount of cache into its new CPU. Because, after all, what do you do when you can't squeeze any higher frequencies out of your processor architecture? You stick a whole lot more cache memory into it and hope for the best. That's what AMD has done on the GPU side with its Infinity Cache, pairing up to 128MB with its RDNA 2 graphics cards, to great effect, and now it's doing the same to its CPUs.
In general, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D either essentially matches or outperforms the Ryzen 9 5950X. That's a great result considering the top Ryzen is still an expensive CPU, and more than ever just a productivity chip and little else. There are also a few times where the CPU outperforms the standard Core i9 12900K, which again is a great achievement. Though, for the most part, it lags behind the Golden Cove microarchitecture of the Alder Lake part when it comes to gaming. Let alone Raptor Lake.
It's a technically elegant, efficient CPU that delivers on its promises. It can't quite beat Intel's hulking brute of a Core i9 12900KS in the frame rate war, but it still offers the majority of AMD users an easy upgrade path to gaming performance that is not far off. And for a fraction of the price and power demands, too. 041b061a72