it's that time of year again full spectrum absorption of light weekend's
eve is but a blink away and man 2018 has been a pretty solid year for
CPU releases hey now if you guys have seen our past
buyer's guides you know the drill it's all about the value you get for your
dollar but unlike our last CPU buyer's guide in
2016 we are not focused solely on team
blue i mean at that time ryzen was but a twinkle in lisa sue's eye but this time
the playing field is wide open so here
it comes our recommendations for gaming
workstation and combined all-rounder
cpus at three price points with each of them linked in the video description
below which theoretically you could just scroll right down to and and buy one of
them now but we that we'd love for you to keep watching and see how we made our
choices world of warships is a free-to-play historical online combat
game from wargaming featuring an exciting blend of action and strategic
gameplay stay tuned later in the video for an exclusive offer
let's start off with what hasn't changed this year
our definition of value value is a surprisingly tough concept to
convey because it is not simply about the price of a particular part i mean if
it were we'd just tell everyone to go buy this 3.4 gigahertz dual core for 350
on ebay or an athlon 200 ge and be done
with it instead we are focused on the greatest amount of performance we can
get per dollar we spend sort of
you see even that still presents a problem
because that athlon 200 ge will appear
to be a tremendous value even for demanding tasks if we only consider its
price and not the price of the hardware
that it's going to be married to by taking the rest of the system into
account we can determine the value that the CPU adds so we're going to show that
added value across three differently weighted categories and because i was a
good boy and slept with a ti 84 under my pillow last night the spreadsheet fairy
aggregated benchmark results from multiple publications to reduce the
likelihood of a single error in our data throwing us off now we're almost ready
to begin but there are a few more rules one you have to actually be able to buy
the CPU and its accompanying hardware brand new which typically means nothing
a full generation old or more two we are not looking at the used market
that's not to say that you shouldn't but due to the volatility of both
availability and pricing it's difficult to make direct recommendations and
that's to say nothing of the awareness bump that us mentioning particular
pieces of used gear always seems to cause and finally three
if the CPU costs more than half of a given system's budget it won't be making
an appearance end of story that would be stupid so let's start things off with
our all-rounder cpus the category where everything from high-end college dorm
pcs to inexpensive esports rigs reign
supreme cause it's all about that versatility at the 500 total system
price point the ryzen 5 2600 series
reigns supreme thanks to its excellent productivity performance and the basic
non-x version's ability to pretty reliably clock up to the same speeds as
the x variant that makes it an ideal choice as long as you're willing to
cheap out on your graphics card and your motherboard a little moving up to the
mid-range the answer is a little bit complicated with its excellent gaming
performance and its eight fast cores the core i7 9700k
takes this category but availability of Intel's 9000 series is
very limited right now and if your balanced workload skews more towards
productivity than gaming the threadripper 1920x might look like a
better bang for your buck except that it
and the motherboard that you'll need to install it on are going to chew up a lot
of your budget so here even though they weren't at the top of our chart the cpus
that we think most people should actually buy for a well-rounded system
are the core i7 8700k and ryzen 7 2700x
to round out the all-rounder segment we've got threadripper for days thanks
to our bloated 2 000 budget with the 2950x beating out the competition
handily in our productivity benchmarks while not being total crap for gaming
this leaves its threadripper brethren to compete with Intel's 9000 series for
second third fourth and fifth place again that is if you can actually find a
9700k on a shelf somewhere now let's shift our focus to gaming this is the
segment where per thread performance counts the most
for our budget recommendation the 2600 series again reigns supreme even at
twice the cost of a ryzen 3 2200g its
performance gains easily justify its additional expense
although given that 200 is 40 of our overall budget if you
splurge on a ryzen 5 you might be stuck with only enough left over for a
middling 1080p GPU so because the focus again is gaming now
we like the core i3 8100 or the ryzen 3
2200g so that you can avoid skimping on the quality of the rest of your rig when
we get to the mid range it looks like you basically can't go wrong with an 8th
gen core i5 except that you kind of can
now the 8600k looks great on paper
but remember that to unlock its full potential you'll need a more expensive z
series motherboard and an aftermarket
cooler pushing its true cost to 300 or
more that's totally fine if your budget is flexible but i have only a thousand
dollars so i'm gonna take the core i5 8500 as for
the high end here the core i5 8600k
takes the crown handily it's fast it's reasonably versatile with its six true
cores and it's actually available to buy
the second place core i7 9700k is also a
great bet but you might end up needing to budget for a new keyboard as
well when you wear out your f5 key trying to get your hands on one AMD does
make an appearance here with the ryzen 7 2700 series about 10 behind in pure
gaming value bringing us finally to the mighty workstation more cores more pci
express lanes more memory bandwidth more power
i know you can go pretty deep down the rabbit hole on a workstation budget the
core i9 7980xc alone is over 2 000 us
dollars and that isn't even technically the workstation model of that CPU but
anyway i doubt those buyers are concerned with our definition of value
here so let's move on at the budget end
you won't really want to spend this little on a workstation you're going to
be stuck with consumer core counts consumer pci elaine counts
but if you're desperate you can get some real work done here with a ryzen 5 2600
and really not much else it's the budget king if you can work it
into your build which if you don't need a high-end GPU for what you do should
actually be easy enough in this case your main budgetary constraints from
there would be storage and system memory
things get more comfortable when we move up to the mid-range here our
threadripper 1920x totally runs away
with the lead sort of got you guys again at 420
it seems doable but the 300 motherboard
is gonna kill you that'll leave only 280
bucks for cooling RAM drives video card case power supply
so our real recommendation here is actually the ryzen 7 2700x with the
8700k getting bumped down slightly due to its lack of ecc memory support that's
a real factor for some people and the extra cost of its cooler and motherboard
finally our high-end workstation results should come as a surprise to no one and
can be summed up in one compound word trademark
threadripper even the most expensive threadripper CPU in our roundup the
2950x is far ahead of anything else
thanks to its decent per thread performance and the fact that well there
are 32 threads across its 16 true cores
the best team blue has to offer here is the core i9 9900k
but at its price matching the 1920x in performance just isn't enough especially
when you consider how few pci express lanes it brings to the table
our real recommendation here is the 2920x
if you don't need a quadro for your line of work or the 1920x if you need to
squeeze in a quadro p4000 so here's the summary for each of our recommendations
at each segment in each price point based on their pricing and the benchmark
data we've collected do bear in mind that some cpus without
included stock coolers will be more expensive to buy than their price tags
suggest and it should also be noted that if any of these cpus experience a price
drop or if they go on sale then your mileage may vary but assuming the price
goes down it's like in a good way so
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