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Best LGA 1151 CPU in 2022

Five LGA 1151 CPUs That are Still Awesome for Gaming
Last Updated on August 19, 2022

If you were on a particularly tight budget when Intel’s Sky and Coffee Lake CPUs were unleashed upon the world, you probably settled for a lower-end model in order to afford a new motherboard with the necessary LGA 1151 socket. Now, seemingly a million mobos later, Intel is slowly preparing the release of Lunar lake, but that LGA 1151 board still has a lot of love to give.

To prove this, we’ve rated and reviewed five of the very best LGA 1151 CPUs you can buy. We’ll look at the high-powered options, some middle-of-the-pack options, and some that are easier on the wallet too. Different though they may be, they all have one thing in common, they’re capable of breathing new life into that LGA 1151 motherboard. Let’s go!

Products at a Glance

Our Recommended

Best LGA 1151 CPU in 2022

1
PROS
  • 8 cores
  • 16 threads make multitasking a walk in the park
  • Facilitates gaming averages beyond 100fps
  • 3.6GHz base and 5GHz boosted clock speeds
CONS
  • A little pricey
2
PROS
  • 8 cores
  • Faster for gaming than our top pick
  • 12MB Intel Smart Cache
  • 3.6GHz base and 4.9GHz boosted clock speeds
CONS
  • No hyperthreading means stilted multitasking
  • Not as future proof as our i9 top pick
3
PROS
  • Paired with a strong Z370 board, it has decent headroom for OC-ing
  • 6 cores
  • Very impressive clock speeds
  • Features the same memory format as high-tier cards
CONS
  • Not great for threaded workloads
4
PROS
  • Great price
  • 6 single cores are ideal for gaming
  • 4.1GHz boost frequency or 3.9GHz across all cores
  • 9MB Intel Smart Cache
CONS
  • Won’t overclock
  • Not suitable for multitasking
  • No integrated Intel graphics card
5
PROS
  • Great clock speeds
  • Awesome price
  • 4 single cores
  • Includes a cooling fan
CONS
  • No integrated graphics card
  • Can’t be overclocked
  • Not too capable of handling parallelizing workflows

Our Verdict

Tech may move pretty dang fast these days, but LGA 1151 motherboards aren’t quite out of the race just yet. There should be something on our list for just about everyone. We have a premium performer in the i9 9900K, for someone looking for an epic all-rounder CPU, and the i7 9700K is the top dog for high frames per second gaming thanks to those single-threaded cores.

Either of our i5 offerings will bring a similar single-core performance to your build for a wallet-friendly price, but you’ll have to sacrifice multitasking capabilities, especially in the i5 9400F. If you’re torn between these two CPUs, simply choose the K if you plan on overclocking and the F if you have no desire to alter stock settings.

Finally, we come to our budget bruiser, the i3. It’s not the most versatile of chips, but if all you want is a dedicated CPU for gaming in 1080p resolutions, it’s absolutely the way forward.

Did any of our LGA 1151 CPU suggestions catch your eye? If not, you may want to start saving for a motherboard with a newer socket, but if this list proves anything, it’s that you really don’t have to any time soon.