When the bossman asked the PC Gamer hardware team to select our personal picks for hardware of the year, I thought about it, and then thought about it some more. As a reviewer that covers a lot of components, my shortlist came down to five items. The Intel Core i5 14600K, Nvidia RTX 4070, ASRock Z790 Taichi Lite and the Alienware OLED 34 AW3423DWF monitor. But in the end, I went with AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D.
At this point in time, there's no such thing as the perfect CPU. The Core i9 14900K is very good, but it runs hot and consumes a lot of power. The Core i5 14600K is also an excellent chip, but it's not revolutionary compared to the Core i5 of 12600K and 13600K fame. AMD's higher core count chips are decent enough, but the Ryzen 9 7950X3D doesn't do enough over the Ryzen 7 7800X3D for me to consider it. And it's expensive. That leaves AMD's 7800X3D on its own. I chose it because it's a gaming chip first and foremost, and unlike most gaming oriented hardware, it's not exorbitantly priced.
