If you want the best gaming performance, or the best price-to-performance ratio, or the more reliable CPUs, or the more efficient CPUs, or the CPUs that don't produce a ton of heat, all those are found in AMD CPUs.

Intel just dropped the ball. 12th gen Intel CPUs are starting to show their age ( Intel is into their 15th generation ). You can still game on the good ones, but there are much better options with AMD.

There are some specific tasks where some Intel chips outperform AMD, but if you need those specific tasks, you likely already know which specific CPU for that task. ( AMD also has certain CPUs that crush Intel at different specific tasks ).

Best gaming CPU currently on the market is the Ryzen 7 9800X3D. But if you don't plan to pair it with a high end, expensive GPU, there are better options.

The Ryzen 5 7500F ( no integrated graphics ) you have to order from East Asia pairs well with a mid range or ''upper-low-range'' GPU.

If you don't want to order from across the globe, the Ryzen 5 7600 is a good price-to-performance.

There is a 7600x version supposedly more powerful, but if you enable Performance Boost Override on a 7600 CPU, it performs basically the same, so don't pay more for the x version.

The 3 CPUs I used as examples are all on the current AM5 platform of motherboards ( which uses DDR5 RAM ). That platform will likely see new CPU releases for another 3 years.

You can still make a very good gaming PC on the previous AM4 platform ( DDR4 RAM ), for cheaper, but your upgrade options will be limited and support / updates will end soon since AMD is well into the AM5 generation.

Beware of some shitty AM5 motherboards if you plan to use a CPU that pulls more power, as if the circuits heat too much it will throttle performance and you'll have no idea what is wrong unless you know about that issue.

That's never going to be an issue with a Ryzen 5 7600 CPU, but it could be if you upgrade your CPU later.

But that's a whole other subject.