Intel's desktop CPU lineup contains at
least, depending how you divide them up, six distinct segments with a total of
nearly three dozen processors ranging all the way from under 50 bucks to
around $1,700.
And while this is admittedly a huge improvement over the last generation
4000 series, which had twice as many in
the desktop range and over 250 total,
it's still super confusing. So, I fired
up ARC, Intel's handydandy product database, extracted the most pertinent
information, and put it in a spreadsheet that you can download below. That should
make choosing the right CPU much, much
easier. And give me a kickback if you buy using the included Amazon
links. Tunnel Bear is the simple VPN app
that makes it easy to browse privately and enjoy a more open internet. To try
Tunnel Bear for free, check out the link in the video description. TLDDR. If
you're building on the cheap, a Pentium G4400 dual core at around 60 bucks is
your best bet. Because if you were willing to spend $92 for the
G4520's marginal speed improvement, the Core i36100 is worth the extra 25 more
thanks to its higher clock speed and hyperthreading. From there, if you're a
heavier multitasker or a light content creator, the whole nont Core i5 lineup
makes a fair amount of sense with the Core i56500 coming in strongest in my mind
thanks to its 19% base clock advantage over the 6400 for only a 10% price
premium. If I was going to spring for an
i56600, personally, I'd pay the extra 20 or so for the K variant. It's got a
higher TDP, that means more power consumption. But with an extra
investment in a Z series motherboard, it supports overclocking, which can either
give you a bit of extra oomph near the end of your computer's usable lifespan
or improve resale value when the time comes to sell it and start from scratch.
This is basically as high as I'd go for
a pure gaming machine. For aspiring
content creators, let's say gamers who also stream or edit together their game
plays for later upload to YouTube, the Core i7
6700K takes everything that's good about the 6600 K and adds hyperthreading, more
cache, and the highest base and boost
clocks across Intel's entire current generation lineup. And you can find
links to all of these processors in the video description. Okay, so the TLDDR is
over, kids. Let's see how we got there. I'm going to start with the easy way.
Weed out products that have zero
customer reviews. A given skew can have
more reviews for a number of reasons. Sometimes it's because the people who
buy them have invested very heavily and feel compelled to shout from the
treetops, especially to each other, about how justified they were in doing
so. Though the psychology of consumer behavior is far beyond the scope of this
video, but the most common reason is that someone else out there has already
done the grunt work research to determine that, for example, the Core
i36100 at $117 makes more sense than the
i36300 at $138 with its barely higher
clock speed, extra 1 meg of cache,
and marginally faster onboard board graphics. There are exceptions to this,
but some solid indicators aside from
reviews are adequate stock and properly
filled out product information pages and
photos. Not to mention the availability of a box version directly from Intel.
Though for a specialty, let's say a super low power consumption build, you
might not be able to avoid nonbox, that is to say tray or OEM parts. The Core
i56400T from the T low power series is a
standout here as a 35W true quad core at 2.2 to 2.8 GHz for
170 bucks. Though we can see that the comparison here is somewhat unfair
because realworld pricing of similar chips like the
6500T is way off of Intel's suggested
price on ARC. This is pretty normal on
these niche SKs though and yet another reason to gravitate towards the higher
volume chips that every retailer in their dog is competing hard to sell so
that they not only sell the CPU but also all the other accessories that go with
it. In fact, for these high volume items, it's not uncommon to see them
going for even less than Intel's MSRP on
sale. Now, let's go deeper. You've probably noticed Xeon processors
sprinkled in with the core branded consumer ones. I included those in my
spreadsheet for the sake of completeness, but in a nutshell, Xeons
at the same specs in the same socket
perform identically to desktop chips and
differ from consumer CPUs primarily in
their ability to use ECC error correcting memory, which you can learn
more about here. Most 1000 series Xeons
can even actually run unofficially though in the same consumer LG1 1151
motherboards as everything else that I've talked about so far. So if you find
one you like, you can do that. Though, please note that ECC memory support
depends on the motherboard chipset, too. So, you'd lose some of the benefit that
you're usually paying extra for in that case. Moving up higher than the 6700 K
means we're getting into two different territories here. Both of which require
moving up to the big boy pants socket LGA
20113. Proumer and professional use where dramatically reducing project
times with more processing cores will improve productivity and therefore
profit. or because I can land where
often knowing what they're doing, enthusiast consumers will drop obscene
amounts of money knowing that they aren't getting a good value. Let's try
to cover both of them. All 2011 3 processors require a $50 to $100 more
expensive motherboard, but they support more PCI Express lanes and quad channel
versus dual channel memory. Though this is of dubious value to the typical gamer
with core branded products and 1000 series Xeon EPS limited to one CPU on a
motherboard, 2000 series Xeon EPS, bumping that up to two CPUs on a
motherboard, and EXClass Zeons capable of running four CPUs on a single
motherboard, though you'll pay a significant premium for that feature. In
the core range, the i76800 K stands out to me. It comes with
28 PCIe lanes, so two-way SLI, the
highest we recommend, is all good. You get 94% of the clock speed at 73% of the
price compared to the 6850K, which also boasts 40 PCIe lanes
if you're an expansion fiend. And like the rest of the HEDT or high-end desktop
Core i7s, it supports overclocking,
meaning that the clock and architectural disadvantage versus the 6700 K that
comes with being based on the slower updated server workstation platform are
a little more palatable given the reasonable $100 premium for 50% more
processing cores. It's got six of them. The rest of the 20113 Core i7s seem to
be priced more like high clock speed, high power consumption Xeon SKs. The
6850K and the 6t900 K hold their own
pretty well against the very similar
E51650 and E51660 if you want to trade ECC support
for overclocking. But as for the 10 core
6950X extreme edition, while it enjoys a
significant max turbo boost clock speed advantage over the entire Xeon range,
with a couple exceptions, including this weird quad core that I wouldn't
recommend over a lowerriced LG 1151 model, it doesn't make as much sense to
me as the similarly priced E52680 V4. I
mean, if you need 10 cores, wouldn't you also benefit from 14 and probably ECC?
Because that's the basic process for choosing a Xeon. In theory, clock speed
times the physical cores and total logical cores provided by hyperthreading
technology, which you can learn more about here, where applicable for
multi-threaded workloads like CPUbased video encoding or 3D modeling and
scientific number crunching, will give you total
performance sort of. And you'll need to weigh that then against your sensitivity
to high power consumption and high price. Though again, it isn't quite that
simple. The base clock is not necessarily representative of the speed
at which the chip will actually operate and neither is the boost for that
matter. This handy chart that I found
for current generation Xeon EP processors reveals that in heavy AVX
loads, the 14 core 2690 V4 costs 20%
more than a 14 core 2680 V4 and appears
to enjoy a 10% clock speed advantage. but in actuality only runs 7% faster
with up to six cores boosted and only three and a half% faster with all 14.
Furthermore, for workstation use, uh, virtualization, that technology that
allowed me to have 10 gamers running off of a single computer here, or bursty,
uh, singlethreaded application use, games love high performance cores. High
boost clocks can be as important as many
cores, if not more so, as our comparison
between the 6700 K quad core, which
costs 350 bucks, and the 6T50X10 core,
which costs 1,700 demonstrated with the
6700 K being a clearly superior gaming
chip due to its higher peak clock speed. I'll have that chart linked below as
well. Which leads us to two more things.
I haven't touched on some specialized features like trusted execution
technology. If you need that, your decision is pretty simple. Buy one of
the few SKs that supports it. And finally, it almost never makes sense to
buy a last generation CPU brand new.
Clearance deals do happen, but they're rare because Intel usually carefully
manages supply in their distribution channels. So, basically nothing is left
by the time the new ones start hitting shelves, usually at the same price for
something slightly better than the old one. Secondhand chips, on the other
hand, can be a steal. I'd take this aging six core for 200 bucks at the time
of writing and overclock the stuffing out of it over our current generation
quad for certain workloads. But watch out, CPUs, especially older ones,
generally outlast their motherboards by a considerable margin. So finding a
compatible board at all, let alone one at a reasonable price with a somewhat
up-to-date feature set, can make this approach less
feasible. So then, have you made it this
far and still feel lost? I'll have some references. I talked about some of them
linked in the video description, but worst case scenario, join the
linesttips.com forum and ask for help. Our community is awesome and someone
would be happy to help you find the right CPU for your new machine. So,
thanks for watching, guys. If this video sucked or it was too long, you know what
to do. But if it was awesome, share it, get subscribed, hit that like button, or
check out the link to where to buy the stuff we talked about at Amazon in the
video description. Also linked in the description is our merch store, which
has cool shirts like this one, and our community forum, which I already mentioned, and you should totally join.
Now that you're done doing all that stuff, you're probably wondering what to watch next. So, click that little button
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