Best CPU for Overwatch

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What are the hallmarks of popularity? Are they when a game has been played by around 20 million people just a few months after its release? Well… yes, that is a dead giveaway. And with that in mind, Overwatch is obscenely popular. But it isn’t just about playing one of the world’s most popular games—it’s about playing it in the absolute best way you can.

Overwatch is, thanks to Blizzard’s genius behind the scenes, a game that runs on a modest Core i3 CPU at the lowest end of things. Basically, if you’re rocking a budget gaming PC you’ll be okay. But those of us pushing for the holy grail of 60 frames per second and all of your settings cranked up to ultra, who already have one of the best graphics cards? That’s the point where you have to take your hardware to the next level—and that’s where the Intel® Core™ i7 comes into things.

We’ve looked before at how the quad-core Intel® Core™ i7-6700K is the best option for gaming right now, with the CPU running at a nippy 4GHz out of the box, and that speed pays off with Overwatch. When paired with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 you’ll be looking at an average frames per second rate of 91 even when playing the game at 4K resolution. This means you’ll be seeing all the detail you can in Overwatch, while enjoying things running as smoothly as they possibly can—the absolute ideal situation when it comes to online competitive gaming.

That competition is important when you’re playing with friends—or just randoms—but giving yourself any edge you can in Overwatch will become even more important for those chosen few looking at competing in the Overwatch League, launching in 2017. The rest of us can just rest easy in the fact our Intel® Core™ i7-6700K will help to run the game perfectly without all the added pressure of professional competition…

You need any edge you can get in competitive multiplayer, and this is no less true in Overwatch. Sure, you might not be looking purely at your kill/death ratio so those twitch-based skills aren’t quite as important as elsewhere—but you still need to be at peak performance levels in every regard to keep sniping as Hanzo or healing as Mercy. The Intel® Core™ i7-6700K keeps you at these peak levels.

Of course, you can have all the help in the world, but it won’t make any different if your aim isn’t on point. Remember, the Intel® Core™ i7-6700K offers the best CPU with which to play Overwatch, but it won’t make you the best player in the world at the game. That’s on you—so get practicing.

Sponsored by Intel