 It's that time of year again. Full spectrum absorption of light weekends 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 Su'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 buy one of them now, but 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 GHz dual core for 350 on eBay or an Athlon 200GE 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 200GE 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 of full generation older 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, because 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 gonna 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 $1,000. 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. Now, I know you can go pretty deep down the rabbit hole on a workstation budget. The Core i9-7980XC alone is over $2,000, 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 PCIe lane 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. Haha, got you guys again. At $420, it seems doable, but the $300 motherboard is going to kill you. That'll leave only $280 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 tag suggests, 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... Happy Turkey Day. Speaking of support, a great way to support us would be to check out our sponsor, World of Warships. It's a free-to-play strategy action game that someone referred to as the Thinking Man's action game. With World of Warships, you can battle it out with 7 million players worldwide, and each in-game ship is actually based on 3D scans of real-life ships. There are over 200 ships to unlock, like the historic USS Missouri and USS Arizona, and with four classes of ships, a bunch of upgrades, weather effects, and strategically designed environments, the action never ends, and every match is different. The game is getting continually updated, so there's always something new. So go get started. New players can get a starter pack that includes up to a million free credits, the HMS Campbellton ship, three days of premium time, and more by entering code PLAYWARSHIPS2018. So thanks for watching, guys. 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