Gadgetory

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 US dollars 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 handy dandy 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 TL DR if you're building on the cheap a pentium g 4400 dual-core at around 60 bucks is your best bet because if you were willing to spend $92 for the g 45 20s marginal speed improvement the core i3 6100 is worth the extra 25 more thanks to its higher clock speed and hyper threading from there if you're a heavier multitasker or a light content creator the whole non T Core i5 lineup makes a fair amount of sense with the core i5 6500 coming in strongest in my mind thanks to its 19% base clock advantage over the 6,400 for only a 10% price premium if I was going to spring for an i5 6600 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 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 gameplays for later upload to youtube the core i7 6700 K takes everything that's good about the 6600 K and adds hyper-threading 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 TL DR 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 SKU 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 show 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 i3 6100 at a hundred and seventeen dollars makes more sense than the i3 6300 at a hundred and thirty-eight dollars with it's barely higher clock speed extra one Meg of cash and marginally faster onboard 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 non box that is to say tray or OAM parts the core i5 6400 tea from the tea low power series is a standout here as a 35 watt true quad core at 2.2 to 2.8 gigahertz for 170 bucks though we can see that the comparison here is somewhat unfair because real-world pricing on similar chips like the 6500 T is way off of Intel suggested price on arc this is pretty normal on these niche skews though and yet another reason to gravitate towards the higher volume chips that every retailer and 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 Zeon's 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 eons can even actually run unofficially though in the same consumer LGA 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 - 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 2011 three prosumer and professional use we're 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 enthusiasts 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 three processors require a 50 to $100 more expensive motherboard but they support more PCI Express Lanes and quad channel vs. dual channel memory though this is a 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 e^x Class C on is capable of running four CPUs on a single motherboard though you'll pay a significant premium for that feature in the core range the i7 6800 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 68 50k which also boasts 40 PCIe lanes if you're in expansion fiend and like the rest of the h EDT 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 hundred dollar premium for 50% more processing cores it's got six of them the rest of the 2011 three core i7s seem to be priced more like high clock speed high power consumption Xeon skews the 68 50k and the 69 hundred K hold their own pretty well against the very similar a 5 1650 and e5 1660 if you want to trade ECC support for overclocking but as for the 10 core 69 50 X 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 lower-priced LGA 1151 model it doesn't make as much sense to me as the similarly priced be 5 2680 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 hyper threading technology you can learn more about here where applicable for multi-threaded workloads like CPU based 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 generations Eon 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 6 cores boosted and only three and a half percent faster with all 14 furthermore for workstation use virtualization that technology that allowed me to have 10 gamers running off of a single computer here or bursty a single threaded application use games love high performance course 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 69 50 x10 core which cost 1700 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 SKUs 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 second hand chips on the other hand can be a steal I'd take this aging 6 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 Linus tech tips comm forum and ask for help our community is awesome and someone would be happy to help you find the right CPU 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