Best CPU for Rainbow Six Siege

What is the Best CPU for Rainbow Six Siege? Let's find out.

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Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege is an online shooter that was released by Ubisoft in 2015 but remains a leading title today. But what is the best CPU for Rainbow Six Siege?

Now Read: Best CPU for gaming

Before we jump into it, let’s take a look at our top picks.

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Best CPU for Rainbow Six Siege: Top picks

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What are Rainbow Six Seige’s CPU requirements?

Rainbow Six Seige is a more CPU-intensive game than your average shooter. Ubisoft only lists an i5-2500K in their recommended specs for the game – a quad-core processor with no hyperthreading and a 3.3GHz clock speed. 

That’s pretty bare bones by today’s standards, and while those specs may be able to run the game at 60FPS with lag and stuttering, they certainly won’t give you a great gaming experience while playing Rainbow Six Seige. 

Playing competitive shooters at 60FPS puts you at an inherent disadvantage against your opponents who are at 144 or 240FPS. They’ll have a slightly faster reaction time, but in games of such a nature, a slightly faster reaction time is all one needs to win a shootout. 

We suggest you go with something much more recent, not that you’d easily be able to find an i5-2500K processor in today’s market anyway. 

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What to look for in a gaming CPU?

The most important elements in a gaming CPU are the processor’s core clock (boost/max clock, to be more specific), core and thread count, and cache. 

For games like Rainbow Six Siege, you’d want your CPU to have a high boost clock since the in-game FPS you get in CPU-bound scenarios is directly tied to it. Anything above 4GHz is solid, and breaking 5GHz will give you top-notch performance.

Core and thread count are less important, but extra threads help you multitask in the background, so you can play some music or hop on a discord call with friends without losing out on a noticeable amount of performance. These days, it’s best to have a processor with at least 12 threads for gaming. 

And lastly, you’d want your CPU to have a high cache. This is an often overlooked aspect when it comes to CPUs, but it does influence performance somewhat.

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Best CPU for Rainbow Six Siege – Intel i5 13600K

Based on the criteria above, we believe the best CPU for Rainbow Six Siege currently available in the market is the Intel core i5 13600K. The 13600K is the latest addition to the i5 lineup, and it is a monstrous processor. 

It has 14 cores and 20 threads. 12 of those threads are run on high-performance cores with the ability to boost up to an incredible 5.1GHz max clock speed. Since it’s an unlocked processor, you can overclock it to raise the max clock even further and squeeze out even more performance from the CPU. 

The 13600K has an exceptionally high thread count for an i5 CPU. Due to this, you’ll even be able to have other applications open in the background while you game. 

Overall, the processor is an excellent compromise between performance and practicality.

It does lose out to the 13th gen i9 and i7 processors in raw performance. But once you’re in such high-end CPU territory, you’ll almost always end up GPU-bound in games. So, the CPU you go with will cause little practical difference.

Speaking of GPUs, you’ll want to pair the 13600K with something like a 6900 XT. Pairing it with anything lower than the RTX 3000 or 6000 XT series wouldn’t be doing it justice. 

The i5 is significantly cheaper than the i7 and i9 processors, so it offers you a much better bang for your buck. 

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Final thoughts

The i5-13600K is an excellent CPU overall, and it’s what we recommend for a high-quality Rainbow Six Siege gaming experience.

It offers you high-end gaming performance but at a mid-range price point. The high FPS this CPU can deliver will really help you out in a competitive shooter such as Rainbow Six Siege.