Between Intel and AMD, these are the best gaming CPUs at every price

If you want to completely revamp your computer to play the latest PC games, it’s smart to start with the processor and work outward. The graphics component is the most important part of the PC gaming equation along with the motherboard, system memory, and storage. But the processor is the heart of your machine, computing all the instructions required to create and maintain a believable virtual environment.When it comes to gaming on a PC on anything but an extremely low budget, there are only two companies worth discussing: Intel and AMD. We broke down our processor choices into price groups, starting with the one that applies to the majority of gamers and then tackling some of the more niche groups further down.Thanks to AMD’s Ryzen CPUs lighting a fire under Intel, the current crop of mainstream CPUs are some of the best gaming chips we’ve seen in years. Better yet, they’re affordable. You can have some of the best chips from both companies for just a few hundred dollars, so if you’re looking for top-gaming performance without breaking the bank, these are your best bets.