Stop gaming on these 4 AMD processors

Credit: Ismar Hrnjicevic / How-To Geek Published Aug 6, 2026, 8:45 AM EDT Ismar is a Senior Author at How-To Geek. He previously worked as a writer, editor, and general manager at a content agency before joining the team in 2023. He began his writing career in 2021 after completing a BA in English Language and Literature. Beyond How-To Geek, Ismar has contributed to Red Stag Fulfillment and Authority Hacker. He has also worked on various SEO projects to help clients improve their search visibility. Ismar has been around Windows PCs since the age of three, so friends and family naturally chose him as the resident tech support. His projects often involve tinkering, such as disassembling mechanical keyboards and gaming mice to mod his beloved gear. He also enjoys pushing hardware to the max through overclocking while staying on a reasonable budget. An avid gamer, Ismar has logged thousands of hours across various genres, including first-person shooters, RPGs, racing games, and roguelites. When he is not at his desk, he is probably exploring other people’s phones to discover their quirks and features or experimenting with the latest AI tools. In his free time, Ismar enjoys spending time with his wife, working out at the gym, playing guitar and bass, cooking gourmet meals, and traveling. Above all else, he’s a proud cat owner. Sign in to your How-To Geek account AMD has been competitive in the CPU market for years now, with Ryzen processors consistently dominating across all price brackets in gaming benchmarks. While modern AM5 and even some AM4 chips are still excellent choices, the same cannot be said for some of AMD's older offerings. These CPUs were impressive gaming chips at launch, but since modern games have become far more demanding, their age is really starting to show. If your processor is on this list, it might be time to start thinking about an upgrade. The AMD FX-9590 was AMD's 5GHz AM3+ dream that's a nightmare to run today The fastest FX chip was also the most infamous The AMD FX-9590 launched in 2013, so it's not too surprising to see it appear on this list. However, its age doesn't tell the whole story, and some context is needed. Between 2013 and 2017, AMD didn't really have a flagship desktop CPU that could compete against Intel's long list of incremental Core i7 generational updates. The AM3+ platform that the FX-9590 sat on was all AMD had (not counting the APUs), so until the release of the first-generation Ryzen chips, this was actually AMD's most powerful consumer CPU. And powerful it was. The FX-9590 was the first consumer desktop CPU that could push its boost clock speed to 5.0GHz out of the box, which was significantly higher than the popular FX-8350's 4.2GHz boost clock speed. It was an impressive feat for an 8-core chip. Admittedly, those 8 cores were mostly in name—the Bulldozer and later Piledriver architectures used four modules with two integer units per module, which made them perform similarly to traditional quad-core CPUs. This misleading marketing later led to a successful class action lawsuit. Today, this chip's age is really starting to show. AMD had much lower IPC (Instructions Per Clock) compared to Intel chips of the era, which made FX processors perform rather poorly in games, and things only got worse as games got more complex. The real problem with the FX-9590, however, is its power draw. To achieve that impressive-sounding 5GHz clock speed, this chip had an eye-watering 220W TDP. On top of needing a beefy CPU cooler, this chip practically draws graphics card levels of power just to deliver rather unimpressive gaming performance. I haven't done the math, but I'm sure that investing in a newer and more power-efficient chip could easily offset the operating costs of this CPU over a few months, which means it simply doesn't make sense in a gaming PC in 2026. The best part? The FX-9590 has become a desirable collector's item, with many listings on eBay asking north of $100 for this infamous CPU. The AMD Ryzen 5 1600 was the value king that brought AMD back, but it's past its former glory A legendary chip that's now showing its age Credit: Bertel King / How-To Geek It's hard to overstate just how important the original Ryzen was to AMD. Not only did it completely change the company forever, but it also shook up the CPU market and broader gaming industry. The Ryzen 5 1600 and the slightly faster 1600X variant are specifically worth calling out, as they marked the first time a mainstream consumer CPU could deliver a whopping 6 cores and 12 threads at such an affordable price. Even though they had slightly worse single-threaded performance, which made them lose out by a few percentage points in games, they made Intel's Core i5 lineup look outdated with its 4 cores and lack of Hyper-Threading. If you needed a chip that could deliver strong gaming performance while also being a powerful streaming, multitasking, and productivity workstation CPU, the Ryzen 5 1600 was all you really needed. As time went on, the 6-core, 12-thread design aged fairly gracefully. Open-world games and other CPU-heavy titles that could utilize more threads became more prevalent, which helped keep the Ryzen 5 1600 relevant for years to come. Unfortunately, all good things have to come to an end, and that includes the first-generation Zen Ryzen 5 that started it all. Its low IPC, old architecture, and lack of official Windows 11 support mean the chip is now well past its gaming prime. The good news is that many AM4 motherboards support much newer and more powerful Ryzen CPUs with a BIOS update, giving you a clear upgrade path forward. Quiz 8 Questions · Test Your KnowledgeFrom Intel to AMD: The evolution of CPUsTrivia challengeFrom the 8086 to Ryzen — how well do you know the chips that power your PC?HistoryIntelAMDArchitecturePerformanceBegin Which Intel processor, released in 1978, is widely considered the ancestor of the modern x86 CPU architecture?AIntel 4004BIntel 8080CIntel 8086DIntel 80286Correct! The Intel 8086, launched in 1978, established the x86 instruction set architecture that almost every modern desktop and laptop CPU still uses today. Its 16-bit design was a massive leap forward and created a legacy that has lasted over four decades.Not quite — the answer is the Intel 8086. While the 4004 was Intel's first commercial microprocessor and the 8080 was influential in its own right, it was the 8086 that introduced the x86 instruction set in 1978, forming the direct foundation of modern PC processors.Continue What was the name of AMD's microarchitecture, introduced in 2017, that dramatically closed the performance gap with Intel after years of falling behind?ABulldozerBPiledriverCZenDSteamrollerCorrect! AMD's Zen architecture, which debuted with the Ryzen processor family in 2017, was a massive generational leap. It nearly doubled AMD's instructions-per-clock performance compared to the struggling Bulldozer architecture, making AMD genuinely competitive with Intel for the first time in years.Not quite — the answer is Zen. Bulldozer, Piledriver, and Steamroller were all AMD architectures that disappointed critics and fell well short of Intel's performance. It was the ground-up Zen redesign in 2017 that finally gave AMD CPUs the competitive edge they had been missing for nearly a decade.Continue Intel's 'Tick-Tock' strategy, used for many years, referred to what development pattern?AAlternating between desktop and mobile CPU releases each yearBAlternating between shrinking the manufacturing process and refining the architectureCReleasing a budget chip followed by a high-end chip every cycleDAlternating between single-core and multi-core performance optimizationsCorrect! Intel's Tick-Tock model meant that one year they would shrink the chip to a new, smaller manufacturing node (the 'Tick'), and the following year they would refine and improve the architecture on that same node (the 'Tock'). This gave Intel a predictable, efficient cadence for years — until it began to break down around 2016.Not quite — Tick-Tock referred to alternating between a manufacturing node shrink and an architectural refinement. The 'Tick' was a die shrink to a smaller process node, while the 'Tock' brought a new microarchitecture on that node. When Intel struggled to move beyond 14nm, this reliable cadence collapsed into the so-called 'Process-Architecture-Optimization' model.Continue Which AMD CPU generation was the first to use a chiplet design, combining multiple smaller dies on a single package instead of one monolithic die?ARyzen 1000 (Zen)BRyzen 2000 (Zen+)CRyzen 3000 (Zen 2)DRyzen 5000 (Zen 3)Correct! Ryzen 3000 (Zen 2), launched in 2019, was the first AMD consumer desktop lineup to use a chiplet architecture. It paired CPU core chiplets built on TSMC's 7nm process with a separate I/O die on a 12nm node, allowing AMD to improve yields, reduce costs, and scale core counts more efficiently.Not quite — it was Ryzen 3000 (Zen 2) in 2019 that introduced chiplets to AMD's consumer desktop lineup. Earlier Ryzen generations used a more traditional design. The chiplet approach, connecting CPU core dies and an I/O die via AMD's Infinity Fabric interconnect, proved so successful that AMD has continued refining it through Zen 4 and beyond.Continue Which company manufactured early AMD processors under a manufacturing agreement that AMD later had to legally fight to escape from?ATexas InstrumentsBMotorolaCIntelDIBMCorrect! In the early days, AMD actually had a cross-licensing agreement with Intel to produce x86-compatible chips. Intel later tried to terminate this arrangement, leading to a lengthy legal battle that AMD ultimately won in 1994, securing its right to independently produce x86-compatible processors — a ruling that shaped PC competition for decades.Not quite — the answer is Intel. AMD and Intel had a historic cross-licensing and second-source manufacturing agreement dating back to the early 1980s. When Intel tried to cut AMD off, AMD sued and won in 1994, cementing its legal right to build x86-compatible CPUs independently. Without that legal victory, the competitive CPU market we know today might never have existed.Continue Intel's 12th-generation Alder Lake CPUs introduced a hybrid architecture to mainstream desktop PCs. What were the two types of cores it combined?ATurbo cores and efficiency coresBPerformance cores and efficiency coresCPower cores and background coresDHyper cores and nano coresCorrect! Alder Lake, launched in late 2021, introduced a hybrid design mixing large Performance cores (P-cores) for demanding workloads with smaller Efficiency cores (E-cores) for background tasks. This approach, inspired by ARM's big.LITTLE design, required updates to Windows 11's scheduler to work optimally and signaled a major shift in how Intel thinks about CPU design.Not quite — Intel calls them Performance cores (P-cores) and Efficiency cores (E-cores). Introduced with the 12th-gen Alder Lake in 2021, this hybrid approach put high-performance cores alongside power-efficient smaller cores on the same chip. It was Intel's biggest architectural shift in years and helped it reclaim competitive ground against AMD's Zen 3 processors.Continue What was the name of Intel's ill-fated CPU architecture, released in 2010, that was primarily designed to combine a CPU and GPU on the same die for high performance?ALarrabeeBItaniumCSandy BridgeDHaswellCorrect! Larrabee was Intel's ambitious project to build a many-core processor combining CPU and GPU-like functionality. It was ultimately cancelled as a consumer product before launch after failing to compete with Nvidia and AMD's dedicated GPUs. Elements of its design did eventually live on in Intel's Xeon Phi line of high-performance computing accelerators.Not quite — the answer is Larrabee. Sandy Bridge and Haswell were both highly successful conventional CPU architectures, while Itanium was Intel's failed 64-bit enterprise chip. Larrabee was the ill-fated project aimed at disrupting the GPU market, but poor performance relative to dedicated graphics cards from Nvidia and AMD caused Intel to cancel it before it ever reached consumers.Continue As of 2024, AMD's high-end desktop Ryzen 9000 series CPUs are built on which manufacturing process node?ATSMC 5nmBTSMC 4nmCTSMC 3nmDSamsung 4nmCorrect! AMD's Ryzen 9000 series, based on the Zen 5 architecture, uses TSMC's 4nm process for the compute chiplets — though AMD and TSMC market some variants of this node under different naming conventions, the consumer Ryzen 9000 desktop CPUs are built on TSMC's 4nm class process. This continues AMD's long partnership with TSMC that began with Zen 2.Not quite — AMD's Ryzen 9000 series (Zen 5) desktop CPUs use TSMC's 4nm process node for their compute chiplets, paired with a 6nm I/O die. AMD has relied exclusively on TSMC for its leading-edge CPU fabrication since the Zen 2 generation in 2019, having exited the chip manufacturing business itself when it spun off its fabs to form GlobalFoundries back in 2009.See My Score Challenge CompleteYour Score/ 8Thanks for playing!Try Again The AMD Ryzen 3 3200G was a Zen 2-sounding chip that tricked people into buying it The branding wasn't super clear Credit: Ismar Hrnjicevic / How-To Geek AMD launched the Ryzen 3000 Series Zen 2 chips in 2019, and they instantly became the new standard that gamers flocked to. The chips were fabricated on TSMC's newest 7nm node while Intel was still struggling with 14nm due to constant delays with its 10nm manufacturing process. In short, Zen 2 and especially the hyper-popular Ryzen 5 3600 helped AMD finally establish itself as a fierce competitor in the CPU market. The same can't be said for the AMD Ryzen 3 3200G. Despite launching alongside Zen 2 chips and wearing a 3000 Series badge, underneath the hood was the Zen+ architecture from 2018 that formed the basis for the Ryzen 2000 Series. I'm not going to defend AMD here. It was a questionable marketing decision. When consumers saw the "3000" and "G" in the name, many assumed this was a brand-new Zen 2 APU that they could use in an office PC and perhaps do some light gaming with, but it was little more than a rebadged Ryzen 3 2200G. As someone who struggled to game on the Ryzen 3 2200G, I can immediately tell you that the chip wasn't great back then, and it's especially atrocious now. The Ryzen 3 3200G's 4-core, 4-thread design is a big part of the reason, but that's still not the whole story. This chip had only 4MB of L3 cache (a fraction of the Ryzen 3 3300X's 16MB), which seriously hurt 1% low FPS and could result in massive stutters. It also only had eight PCIe 3.0 lanes for a dedicated graphics card, meaning you had to be really careful about which GPU you'd pair with this chip to avoid a potentially massive bottleneck. The only reason people bought the Ryzen 3 3200G in the first place was the Radeon Vega 8 integrated GPU, which was capable of running some light gaming at release. Today, this chip is practically worthless in a gaming rig, especially given the abundance of used Zen 2 and Zen 3 chips on online marketplaces. The AMD Ryzen 3 3300X was a budget king at release, but AMD has never followed it up for a good reason A gaming favorite that disappeared for a reason Credit: Nick Lewis / How-To Geek The AMD Ryzen 3 3300X was miles ahead of the aforementioned Ryzen 3 3200G. Launching at a price of just $120, it became an instant hit among gamers on a tight budget. The new Zen 2 architecture delivered a massive performance boost, and since many games back in 2020 still couldn't fully utilize 6 or 8 cores, the 4-core, 8-thread Ryzen 3 3300X just made sense. You could allocate more of your budget towards the graphics card to get more FPS, and the chip was fast enough that CPU bottlenecks were rarely a concern. In short, the Ryzen 3 3300X was an instant hit, and demand was so high that AMD struggled to keep up with production. It quickly became difficult to find at MSRP, which is part of the reason many people ended up opting for the Ryzen 5 3600 instead. However, as good as this CPU was in 2020, the problem with gaming on the Ryzen 3 3300X in 2026 is its quad-core design. While it helped keep prices low at a time when games couldn't utilize multiple cores as effectively, it simply didn't age as well as the Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 variants from the same era. We're now approaching a point where even 6-core CPUs are starting to show a performance gap compared to 8-core models in some demanding games, so it's no surprise that AMD has largely moved away from Ryzen 3 desktop CPUs in favor of the Ryzen 5 lineup. The Ryzen 3 3300X was a fantastic budget gaming CPU in its time, but its ancient four-core design has finally caught up with it, and I simply can't recommend spending money on this chip for a gaming PC in 2026. AMD has come a very long way since these chips AMD has had some truly impressive CPUs over the years, but they simply couldn't keep up as technology moved forward and games got more advanced. Today, AMD is approaching what will presumably be the 10th generation of Ryzen processors, and it's exciting to think about where that could lead the broader gaming industry in the coming years. Naturally, the downside of a constant push forward is that today's CPUs will slowly become outdated as well. Who knows, maybe in just a couple of years, my beloved Ryzen 7 7700 could end up on another outdated CPU list!