What CPU to Buy - Late 2018
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
1,843 words · ~9 min read
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it's that time of year again full spectrum absorption of light weekend's
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eve is but a blink away and man 2018 has been a pretty solid year for
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CPU releases hey now if you guys have seen our past
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buyer's guides you know the drill it's all about the value you get for your
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dollar but unlike our last CPU buyer's guide in
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2016 we are not focused solely on team
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blue i mean at that time ryzen was but a twinkle in lisa sue's eye but this time
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the playing field is wide open so here
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it comes our recommendations for gaming
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workstation and combined all-rounder
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cpus at three price points with each of them linked in the video description
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below which theoretically you could just scroll right down to and and buy one of
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them now but we that we'd love for you to keep watching and see how we made our
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choices world of warships is a free-to-play historical online combat
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game from wargaming featuring an exciting blend of action and strategic
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gameplay stay tuned later in the video for an exclusive offer
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let's start off with what hasn't changed this year
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our definition of value value is a surprisingly tough concept to
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convey because it is not simply about the price of a particular part i mean if
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it were we'd just tell everyone to go buy this 3.4 gigahertz dual core for 350
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on ebay or an athlon 200 ge and be done
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with it instead we are focused on the greatest amount of performance we can
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get per dollar we spend sort of
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you see even that still presents a problem
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because that athlon 200 ge will appear
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to be a tremendous value even for demanding tasks if we only consider its
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price and not the price of the hardware
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that it's going to be married to by taking the rest of the system into
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account we can determine the value that the CPU adds so we're going to show that
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added value across three differently weighted categories and because i was a
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good boy and slept with a ti 84 under my pillow last night the spreadsheet fairy
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aggregated benchmark results from multiple publications to reduce the
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likelihood of a single error in our data throwing us off now we're almost ready
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to begin but there are a few more rules one you have to actually be able to buy
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the CPU and its accompanying hardware brand new which typically means nothing
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a full generation old or more two we are not looking at the used market
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that's not to say that you shouldn't but due to the volatility of both
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availability and pricing it's difficult to make direct recommendations and
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that's to say nothing of the awareness bump that us mentioning particular
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pieces of used gear always seems to cause and finally three
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if the CPU costs more than half of a given system's budget it won't be making
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an appearance end of story that would be stupid so let's start things off with
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our all-rounder cpus the category where everything from high-end college dorm
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pcs to inexpensive esports rigs reign
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supreme cause it's all about that versatility at the 500 total system
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price point the ryzen 5 2600 series
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reigns supreme thanks to its excellent productivity performance and the basic
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non-x version's ability to pretty reliably clock up to the same speeds as
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the x variant that makes it an ideal choice as long as you're willing to
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cheap out on your graphics card and your motherboard a little moving up to the
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mid-range the answer is a little bit complicated with its excellent gaming
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performance and its eight fast cores the core i7 9700k
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takes this category but availability of Intel's 9000 series is
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very limited right now and if your balanced workload skews more towards
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productivity than gaming the threadripper 1920x might look like a
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better bang for your buck except that it
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and the motherboard that you'll need to install it on are going to chew up a lot
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of your budget so here even though they weren't at the top of our chart the cpus
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that we think most people should actually buy for a well-rounded system
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are the core i7 8700k and ryzen 7 2700x
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to round out the all-rounder segment we've got threadripper for days thanks
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to our bloated 2 000 budget with the 2950x beating out the competition
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handily in our productivity benchmarks while not being total crap for gaming
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this leaves its threadripper brethren to compete with Intel's 9000 series for
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second third fourth and fifth place again that is if you can actually find a
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9700k on a shelf somewhere now let's shift our focus to gaming this is the
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segment where per thread performance counts the most
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for our budget recommendation the 2600 series again reigns supreme even at
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twice the cost of a ryzen 3 2200g its
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performance gains easily justify its additional expense
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although given that 200 is 40 of our overall budget if you
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splurge on a ryzen 5 you might be stuck with only enough left over for a
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middling 1080p GPU so because the focus again is gaming now
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we like the core i3 8100 or the ryzen 3
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2200g so that you can avoid skimping on the quality of the rest of your rig when
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we get to the mid range it looks like you basically can't go wrong with an 8th
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gen core i5 except that you kind of can
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now the 8600k looks great on paper
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but remember that to unlock its full potential you'll need a more expensive z
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series motherboard and an aftermarket
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cooler pushing its true cost to 300 or
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more that's totally fine if your budget is flexible but i have only a thousand
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dollars so i'm gonna take the core i5 8500 as for
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the high end here the core i5 8600k
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takes the crown handily it's fast it's reasonably versatile with its six true
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cores and it's actually available to buy
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the second place core i7 9700k is also a
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great bet but you might end up needing to budget for a new keyboard as
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well when you wear out your f5 key trying to get your hands on one AMD does
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make an appearance here with the ryzen 7 2700 series about 10 behind in pure
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gaming value bringing us finally to the mighty workstation more cores more pci
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express lanes more memory bandwidth more power
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i know you can go pretty deep down the rabbit hole on a workstation budget the
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core i9 7980xc alone is over 2 000 us
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dollars and that isn't even technically the workstation model of that CPU but
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anyway i doubt those buyers are concerned with our definition of value
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here so let's move on at the budget end
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you won't really want to spend this little on a workstation you're going to
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be stuck with consumer core counts consumer pci elaine counts
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but if you're desperate you can get some real work done here with a ryzen 5 2600
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and really not much else it's the budget king if you can work it
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into your build which if you don't need a high-end GPU for what you do should
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actually be easy enough in this case your main budgetary constraints from
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there would be storage and system memory
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things get more comfortable when we move up to the mid-range here our
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threadripper 1920x totally runs away
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with the lead sort of got you guys again at 420
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it seems doable but the 300 motherboard
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is gonna kill you that'll leave only 280
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bucks for cooling RAM drives video card case power supply
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so our real recommendation here is actually the ryzen 7 2700x with the
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8700k getting bumped down slightly due to its lack of ecc memory support that's
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a real factor for some people and the extra cost of its cooler and motherboard
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finally our high-end workstation results should come as a surprise to no one and
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can be summed up in one compound word trademark
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threadripper even the most expensive threadripper CPU in our roundup the
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2950x is far ahead of anything else
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thanks to its decent per thread performance and the fact that well there
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are 32 threads across its 16 true cores
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the best team blue has to offer here is the core i9 9900k
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but at its price matching the 1920x in performance just isn't enough especially
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when you consider how few pci express lanes it brings to the table
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our real recommendation here is the 2920x
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if you don't need a quadro for your line of work or the 1920x if you need to
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squeeze in a quadro p4000 so here's the summary for each of our recommendations
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at each segment in each price point based on their pricing and the benchmark
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data we've collected do bear in mind that some cpus without
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included stock coolers will be more expensive to buy than their price tags
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suggest and it should also be noted that if any of these cpus experience a price
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drop or if they go on sale then your mileage may vary but assuming the price
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goes down it's like in a good way so
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happy turkey day speaking of support a great way to support us would be to
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play warships 2018. so thanks for watching guys if you
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disliked this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed or maybe consider checking
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out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description also down there is our merch store which
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has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should
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definitely join