Two Intel chips break Amazon's top 10 CPUs for the first time in months — Core Ultra 7 270K and Core i7-14700K finally challenge AMD desktop dominance

AMD has been the dominant force in DIY PC building CPUs for several years now, thanks to the advent of Zen 3 and great chips like the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, and more recently its potent Ryzen 7 X3D SKUs like the 9800X3D. Now, just days after AMD touted that it continues to occupy all 10 slots in the Amazon CPU best-sellers list, a couple of Intel CPUs have broken into the list for the first time in months, as spotted by WCCFTech.

The two chips in question aren't surprising if you know ball. Coming in at number six is the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus for $290 USD; Intel's most recently released desktop CPU, and at nine we have the workaday Core i7-14700K for $312, a steady seller since its launch in 2023. It offers less performance in gaming than many of the other chips in the top 10 (including the cheaper 270K Plus), but it has the advantage of being able to slot into both aging LGA 1700 systems as well as new builds with DDR4 memory. That's also likely why the Ryzen 5 5500 continues to stay near the top of the chart at #2, while the Ryzen 5 5600X and Ryzen 7 5800X3D (in its 10th Anniversary guise) also rate high. As for the Core i7-14700K, we actually recommended it over the Ryzen 7 5800X3D in our review of the 10th Anniversary re-release of that chip for people who are building new DDR4 machines.

The Core Ultra 7 270K Plus appearing this high is heartening for Intel's sake, though. If you haven't kept up with Intel's CPU releases, this chip is a course correction from the first-generation "Arrow Lake" processors, offering outstanding productivity performance and very solid gaming performance, just a few percentage points off of the beloved Ryzen 7 7800X3D that sits one position above it in the rankings. Put frankly, the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus beats everything else in the top 10 for both single- and multi-core performance save for the $569 Ryzen 9 9950X3D, which is in an entirely different price class from the $290 Intel chip (though discounted quite significantly at $569, 19% off the $699 list price)

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It's clear that gaming continues to be a top driver for the DIY market. Five of the chips in the top 10 have been on our list of the Best CPUs for Gaming either now or at some point, including the number one seller, the Ryzen 7 9800X3D. AMD's 3D V-Cache continues to be unbeatable in gaming, even if the Arrow Lake 'Plus' parts do their best to close the gap with extremely high single-core performance. It's not single-threaded speed that's the bottleneck anymore, though, and not for some time; the limitation in gaming frames is multivariate as it has ever been, but on the CPU side, it's largely down to memory performance these days, and that's exactly why AMD's 3D V-Cache chips dominate.

Of course, if you're reading Tom's Hardware, you probably don't need me to tell you that. But it's interesting to look at the pricing of the parts that are moving the most units. The Ryzen 5 5500 is a tame processor, but if you need a gaming PC for the absolute bottom dollar, it's hard to beat six Zen 3 cores with a CPU cooler for $84. The Ryzen 7 7800X3D seems an absurd choice next to the much faster Ryzen 7 9800X3D for less than $100 more, but the gaming performance is really pretty close, and you're likely to desire a drop-in Zen 6 processor upgrade late this year or early next year, so why spend the extra $85 now?

That CPU upgrade angle warrants consideration. Any Socket AM5 processor has a path forward, and that's not the case for any extant Intel platform nor for Socket AM4, despite the fact that Intel is apparently releasing new LGA 1700 chips eventually. Ultimately, memory pricing is probably driving a lot of these choices, but in the upgrade context, it's not quite as surprising to see five and a half of the top ten CPUs on platforms that require DDR5 memory—the 'half' being the Core i7-14700K, naturally.

You absolutely can build a DDR4 machine using the Raptor Lake Refresh CPUs, but the performance penalty can be significant; in our testing, we found that it was actually worse than just running a single DDR5 DIMM. It's the PC builder's Sophie's Choice: buy a last-generation CPU to save significant cash on the RAM, or suck it up and spend out massively on a system that offers the best performance now.

Pricing is naturally also a factor; the Core Ultra 7 270K Plus launched at the comically low price of $299 in comparison to the $589 Core Ultra 9 285K, which it performs very close to, so $290 isn't much of a discount there. Meanwhile, the Core i7-14700K's $311.99 price tag is 16% off of Amazon's list price of $370.99, but it's a bit larger markdown from Intel's $419 recommended customer price. Still, if pricing is your primary motivator, it's hard to ignore the $330 Ryzen 7 7800X3D (27% off list), at least as long as gaming is your main concern. There's the 5800X3D 10th Anniversary, too, but again, the Core i7-14700K actually offers better minimum framerates and vastly superior productivity performance, especially if you're willing to do some memory tuning.

Clearly, gamers have accepted that memory pricing isn't coming back down any time soon, and that the time to buy is now before it gets even worse. The shortage isn't expected to abate between now and late 2028; if you're keen to build a new machine in the in-between, make sure you keep an eye on our Deals posts to save yourself from bleeding too much at the checkout.

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