There's a lot you can do with $30 saved. Spend it on slightly faster RAM, a graphics card with slightly better custom features (cooling/OC), a slightly bigger SSD, or even a couple of half-decent games at the next seasonal Steam sale. The $30 savings is the biggest takeaway from the Core i5-8500. At 1080p, 1440p, and 4K UHD (resolutions gamers play at), this chip offers identical gaming performance to the $30 pricier i5-8600, which in turn performs on-par with the $50 pricier i5-8600K. We can only express bewilderment at how densely Intel packed its Core i5 desktop processor lineup this time around, with each cheaper SKU making the slightly pricier one look pointless.

We are happy to report that the Core i5-8500 won't bottleneck today's high-end graphics cards, and if you're a PC gamer in the market for a reasonably priced build, and want to spend no more than $250 on a processor, we can do you one better by recommending the i5-8500 at $200, instead. The processor performs bang on-par with the i5-8600 at gaming, with whatever decimal-point percentage difference between the two being easily written off to random variation. This purportedly 3.00 GHz chip sustains 3.90 GHz on all cores and can boost between 4.00-4.10 GHz on lighter (read: gaming) workloads, which is how it's able to catch up with pricier SKUs.

The performance gaps only become noticeable in CPU tests, where a lot are multi-threaded, capable of taking advantage of any number of cores and threads you throw at them. This is where the 3.90 GHz chip ends up 4 percent slower than the i5-8600 (which sustains 4.10 GHz across all cores). It's also narrowly beat by the Ryzen 5 2600 due to the AMD chip featuring SMT. The 2600 is better endowed on paper, and succeeds in staying ahead in CPU tests, but stays 5%-8% behind in gaming. Or to rephrase that, choosing the i5-8500 over the 2600 results in a 5%-10% gaming performance jump. As we get lower down the price band, every bit of gaming performance counts, but across our gaming tests, the Ryzen 5 2600-powered machine was indistinguishably different in playability.

The marginally lower clock speeds than the i5-8600 mean that the i5-8500 is more efficient. One area where the chip surprised us is with energy utilization (i.e. energy consumed to finish a task), where it ended up more efficient than the i5-8600. It consumed less energy to finish the task and was within striking distance of the i7-8700K. Due to the lack of an unlocked multiplier, there's no overclocking fun to be had beyond marginally increasing the base clock by just below 103 MHz, which provides a free 125 MHz overclock. The competing Ryzen 5 2600 comes with an unlocked multiplier, which should let you squeeze out more performance, and get ahead of the i5-8500. If you're not all that into gaming and just want a cost-effective desktop for creative work that's multi-threaded, the Ryzen 5 2600 remains a formidable option.

Overall, the Core i5-8500 is a great option for gamers looking to mitigate money spent on terribly priced graphics cards with cost-cutting on other components. You get the same gaming performance as the $30 pricier i5-8600 and $50 pricier i5-8600K and don't lose a tangible amount of performance in productivity tasks. The chip is noticeably ahead of the Ryzen 5 2600 at gaming, although the unlocked multiplier of the AMD chip lets it catch up. Given AMD offers CPU overclocking on even its mid-range B350 chipset, the Ryzen 5 2600 is such a good alternative that the i5-8500 stays ahead by the skin of its teeth.