I got a GPU but what did it cost
it's a story that's all too common which is why instead of buying a fancy new
Intel 12th Gen processor you're watching this video where we're gonna figure out
the absolute best way to save a buck on
your CPU you see there's a lot of secondhand chips out there that might
look like a great deal like this twenty
dollar overclockable Xeon but as we've seen there can be hidden costs that are
driving the prices so low I think the
answer is going to surprise you but what won't surprise you is our sponsor
Corsair their new h150i Elite LCD is a
Premium All-In-One CPU Cooler that combines powerful low noise cooling with
vibrant RGB lighting and a personalized LCD display that you can put custom
graphics on to Accent your system's Aesthetics and to track real-time
performance at a glance
to best reveal our CPU bottlenecks we're going to be using a current gen GPU for
our benchmarks the RTX 3060 TI and we
used the Corsair xenion monitor for all of our testing since a it's gorgeous and
B While most of our benchmarks are going to be at 1080p to really separate the
wheat from the chaff we think 1440p gaming is really the modern sweet spot
and at the end we're going to want a game on this setup to see if our best
value combo can keep up with 1440p high
refresh rate gaming at just 23.45 the
Xeon w3670 gives you a lot of CPU per
dollar and looked like the obvious choice at least on paper I mean sure it
was back in 2010 but in its prime this thing was a 600 top of the line Beast
with six cores and a turbo frequency of 3.5 gigahertz at least until you
overclock it that's right intelligent quite locked down Xeon overclocking yet
and we were able to take this little guy up to four gigahertz on all cores
yielding a cinebench R23 score of over 5000 points that's respectable even by
modern standards and we got performance and everything else that ranged from
terrible to worse
in games it spoiler alert managed less
than half the FPS of the other CPUs we tested and making matters worse getting
it to play nice with Windows 10 was a bit of a pain in the butt hello legacy
mode running Windows 7 is an easy enough work around but know that Microsoft no
longer supports the OS and you're going to lose out on some small games you've
probably never heard of like Forza Horizon 5 and Halo infinite
ouch oh and we also ran into this cool little bug where sleep doesn't work and
the system needs a full reboot every time your mileage may vary so you're
dealing with significant quality of life issues on a CPU that gets a quarter of
its speed from a ratchet static voltage overclock on a 10 year old motherboard
not something that I can straight faced recommend and it gets worse but first
let's take a look at our second Contender the Intel Core i5 2500k is a
four core Beauty from 2011 that you can pick up for about 50 bucks these days
getting it to work with Windows 10 was much easier than the Xeon but while the
I5 is noticeably quicker than the Xeon that doesn't prevent you from feeling
its age normal tasks feel a bit sluggish
compared to a modern platform though In fairness we were able to remedy that a
fair bit with a moderate overclock this is our second CPU now that topped out at
4 gigahertz all core netting us a 10 Improvement in single threaded workloads
and 20 in multi-threaded workloads where
frankly it needs all the help it can get with a cinebench R23 score of 29.92 our
second gen core was by far the slowest CPU we tested in multi-threaded loads
due in part to the 2500k's lack of simultaneous multi-threading for gaming
it was more of a mixed bag though in Shadow of the Tomb Raider and CS Go
performance was excellent and it even ended up beating some much newer CPUs
but in Forza Horizon 4 and F1 2021 the
results were brutal if you plan on playing mainly older games the 2500k
might be fine then but every time you boot up a new game you are rolling the
dice and the inconsistent performance isn't even the biggest problem buying
all the old supporting components is for
both the 2500k and the Xeon you can expect to pay around sixty dollars for a
motherboard including shipping plus another 45 dollars for DDR3 RAM both of
which are well past their best before date and get this while we were
configuring the overclock for our 2500k our first motherboard straight up died
completely destroying any chance of that setup being price competitive with newer
Hardware thing is though even if that hadn't
happened these 10 year old motherboards and 16 gigs of DDR3 RAM are coming in at
only about five dollars less expensive than a modern b450 board and ddr4 RAM
both of which could be carried forward to a future upgrade to a modern
processor so why are these old components so expensive allow me to
introduce the bathtub curve this is a
simple visual that shows the odds of a device failing over its lifetime off of
the production line You'll usually get a bunch of failures right away usually due
to manufacturing defects these are going to be either caught in QC or burn-in or
they're going to fail quickly out in the field hopefully covered by warranty
after that the chances of the device failing at least a well-designed one get
pretty low for a long period of time then towards the end of their expected
life the components start to wear down and failures begin to increase again for
motherboards anecdotally at least this seems to happen around the six year mark
So as more and more motherboards begin to fail you eventually wind up in a dumb
situation like x99 motherboards from 2014 that'll go for as much as 300
dollars which raises the question why are people
willing to pay so much for these things well here's the thing CPUs tend to have
much much lower failure rates compared to motherboards so you end up with this
surplus of working CPUs compared to a
dwindling number of compatible working motherboards that exist to put them in
the Surplus drives down the cost of the older CPUs but it's deceptive because
maybe your CPU is only 20 bucks but you're going to spend a fortune actually
getting the thing running the bottom line then is that it is hard
to justify investing in Old Hardware when you're confronted with both these
problems and the complete lack of any upgrade path the only old Hardware you
should really be investing in is the old Hardware we've printed on t-shirts from
lttstore.com nothing illustrates this point better than our next processor the
legendary Intel Core i7 4770k I was
honestly shocked when I realized that this CPU is now 8 years old because it
sure doesn't feel like it in Windows I mean if you wanted Windows to feel any
snap here you would need a brand spanking new machine with a fast NVMe
SSD and in gaming Mr Haswell here was
the fastest CPU we tested across the board so if you're currently rocking one
of these in your system you can safely upgrade to an RTX 3060 TI and sleep
soundly knowing that there is no reason to upgrade until your motherboard gives
up the ghost what you shouldn't do though is go out and buy a 4770k for a
whole new computer because all in the 4770k was the most expensive of CPU we
tested the good news though is that although we were able to overclock it to
4.4 gigahertz all core our gaming performance barely increased that tells
us that the 4770k is performance enough to keep up with our 3060 TI right out of
the box and I say this is a good thing because it means that you don't have to
be super concerned about getting a k-series SKU a regular i-74770 or I5
4550 is going to be more than fine and if you're lucky you might be able to
find one of those for cheap in an old pre-build these are the kinds of deals
that you don't find by going on eBay though so keep your eye on your local
Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace for an Old Dell or think station desktop
that's just a GPU away from gaming greatness at 110 dollars for a 4770k
standalone though I think it's a bad buy this is also why the 4770k is the last
Intel CPU on our list because you can
buy a 6700k or an i5 8400 but it's very
hard to justify a semi-modern Intel CPU
because they cost the same if not more than a ryzen 3300x or an i5 10 400 which
you can buy brand new today both of which are going to have similar
performance without the hassle of screwing around with a used motherboard
that has no meaningful upgrade path if you're feeling lucky you could get an
8700k and a motherboard with bent pins but in general the price of an Intel
motherboard especially one that can overclock makes it really hard for their
old platforms to compete with AMD which means the smarter play is to pick up an
affordable b450 board that can run any AMD CPU from ryzen 1000 all the way up
to ryzen 5000 assuming you've got the right BIOS on it on that note let's talk
about the AMD ryzen 5 1500x you can get
one of these for around 85 dollars and although historically that isn't a
game-changing deal like back when the 2600 AF was a thing performance across
the board is acceptable which really drives home how much much of a lead
Intel squandered in the last few years 1500x ends up losing to the 4770k across
the board despite being five years newer
but it benefits from an extremely low total cost of Entry a hundred and ninety
dollars gets you the core bits and since you're getting a b450 board when you
have a bit more cash you can upgrade to something that will absolutely slay and
this is the main reason that I'd recommend the 1500x over the core i5
6400 their price and performance are comparable but Intel has 50 fewer cores
and no meaningful upgrade path oh one thing to note though is that if
you are buying a new b450 board off the shelf see if you can find one that does
not have the ryzen 5000 desktop ready badge on the front due to limited
storage on the BIOS chip you can't actually have support for both 1000 and
5000 series CPUs at the same time so you
might need to use a CPU free flashback feature or go to your local computer
shop and have them install a special BIOS so you can get first gen ryzen
support one interesting part of our tests is that it demonstrates even more
clearly than our recent video how more gigahertz does not equal more
performance when overclocked the ryzen 5 1500x Xeon w3670 and i7 2500k are all
switching at four gigahertz but the results are dramatically different due
to IPC or instructions per clock improvements the more modern ryzen is
able to do a lot more with its 4 billion switches than the older intels something
that is very important to keep in mind when you're shopping for older CPUs that
on paper might look really fast our final processor for today is a
budget build classic the AMD ryzen 5 2600 and 2600x they're both selling for
about a hundred and twenty dollars making them very compelling performance
and price wise they land right between the 1500x and the 4770k but without the
expensive motherboard woes of the core i7 if you plan on doing any
multi-threaded work the 2600 absolutely destroys anything else that we looked at
for bang for the buck now let's kick things up a notch and see how our best
value setup here handles 1440 gaming on our Corsair Xenon monitor my poor team
waiting for me to load this map let's see am I going to end up with a team of
people that know how to stay together so that
you know we can we can live is there a pair of
headphones nearby monitor looks great so that's cool I want this overshield
though okay other than very occasional
hitches that we've seen it's
pretty good like what are we looking at 100 FPS average 99 lows that are 60 at
65 like not bad like absolutely no excuse
for not winning on this thing no no
oh damn no can you still game on first
gen ryzen the answer is yes as long as your teammates will wait for you to load
the map so what's our final verdict I think it's pretty easy to say that if you're going
used go for the ryzen 5 1500x or if
you've got a few more dollars to spend any second gen ryzen at or around a
hundred dollars it won't give you the best performance per dollar but you will
definitely save money in the long run with ddr4 memory and a motherboard that
you can carry forward to a more powerful setup once your nft investment pays off
if you guys are looking for another video to watch why don't you go check
out why CPU gigahertz doesn't matter it's a good little rundown on buy these
performance differences for so wide