Need help with picking new CPU!

Hello all,

I just got a new 3090 Ti and am building a new PC for gaming and emulating at 1440P, and after reading the CPU recommendation list I am even more confused as to what to get lol.

I was aiming for a i7 13700K or 14700K, or perhaps a Ryzen if they were that much better, but then I looked at the RPCS3 CPU Buying Tier list and saw that the 12th gen i9 12900K was still topping all of the lists, I mean *EVERY* single one. That's an absolutely dominating level of performance, and made me a bit unsure as to which processor I should go with now.

I plan to game normal PC games as well as emulate at 1440P max, no 4K. I also don't do any video or media editing, just games, emulators, and watching movies.

The 12900K is an absolute steal at the moment at $180, vs $340 for the 13700K, but the 13700K is far newer and performs much better in non-rpcs3 tasks, and I am worried I would be gimping my computer with older hardware just because of RPCS3, and am wondering if the performance trade off is truly that good on the 12900K vs the 13700K or 14700K, or even 14900K?

Basically, is it worth going with the older hardware, or do the newer 13th and 14th gens still do exceptionally well, and would perform better in non-emulation vs the older 12900K?

Thank you all for putting up with my noobie questions, and I look forward to your answers!

As indicated in the CPU Tier List, the 12th gen CPUs are only on top if heavily tuned AND with AVX-512 enabled, so you will need older CPU models that didn't have the feature removed which might be harder to find, plus a motherboard with a BIOS version with older microcode patched in. If you buy a 12th gen CPU new it's very likely to not come with AVX-512 support.

Just get a 14700k/kf dude. Its going to do a lot better in everything else, and still do pretty damn well in rpcs3, and you don't have to go turning off half your cores to get the best performance (if you are lucky enough to get one that works with avx512 anyway - which isn't likely).

I was aiming for a i7 13700K or 14700K, or perhaps a Ryzen if they were that much better, but then I looked at the RPCS3 CPU Buying Tier list and saw that the 12th gen i9 12900K was still topping all of the lists, I mean *EVERY* single one. That's an absolutely dominating level of performance, and made me a bit unsure as to which processor I should go with now.