Gaming - how low can you go for 60FPS?

[MoonBoots]

I see a lot of posts recommending £300+ CPUs like the 5800X3D or 7800X3D, but looking at benchmarks it seems that even low end modern CPUs easily get well over 60FPS in most games, sometimes well over 100FPS. So if you're targeting 60FPS and don't use your PC for anything other than gaming wouldn't you be far better off getting something like a 5700 or 7600 for £150-200ish and putting the cash you've saved towards the GPU? Even the 7600 looks a bit excessive for 60FPS based on the benchmarks I've seen, other than a few beastly games like Starfield.

Or am I missing something?

 

[MoonBoots]

Yeah, but most of the posts on here are either for AM4 upgrades, or for new gaming rigs, with decent graphics (e.g. 4070 / 7800 XT or higher) and the 5800X3D/7800X3D are the best gaming CPUs if you can afford one.

Sure, although I imagine even at the 4070 / 7800 XT level you'd still be very much GPU bottlenecked even with a £150 CPU? Except for eSports titles at 1080p I guess.

I suppose the argument is that CPUs are more of a pain to upgrade (especially when the socket is no longer supported) so if you can get a much better CPU for just an extra £200 its worth it for future proofing because the cheaper CPU might not even give you enough of a saving to move up a single GPU tier anyway.