 I got a GPU! But what did it cost? Everything. 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 $20 overclockable Xeon, but as we've seen, there can be hidden costs that are driving the prices so low. I think the answer's gonna 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. Let's go. To best reveal our CPU bottlenecks, we're gonna be using a current gen GPU for our benchmarks, the RTX 3060 Ti, and we used the Corsair Xeon monitor for all of our testing since A, it's gorgeous, and B, while most of our benchmarks are gonna 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 gonna want to 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, Intel hadn't 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 5,000 points. That's respectable even by modern standards, and we got performance in 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 isn't easy enough workaround, but know that Microsoft no longer supports the OS, and you're gonna 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 four 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 2992, 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 CSGO, 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 $60 for a motherboard, including shipping, plus another $45 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. The 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 $5 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 gonna be either caught in QC or burn-in, or they're gonna fail quickly out in the field, hopefully covered by warranty. After that, the chances of a 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. 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 gonna 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 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 eight years old because it sure doesn't feel like it in Windows. I mean, if you wanted Windows to feel any snappier, 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 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 performant 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 skew. A regular i7 4770 or i5 4550 is gonna be more than fine. And if you're lucky, you might be able to find one of those for cheap in an old pre-built. 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 ThinkStation desktop that's just a GPU away from gaming greatness. At $110 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 i5-10400, which you can buy brand new today, both of which are gonna 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. And although historically that isn't a game-changing deal, like back when the 2600AF was a thing, performance across the board is acceptable, which really drives home how much of a lead Intel squandered in the last few years. The 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. $190 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 four billion switches than the older Intel's. 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 $120, 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 Xeon monitor. My poor team waiting for me to load this map. Let's see, am I gonna end up with a team of people that know how to stay together so that, you know, we can live? Is there a pair of headphones nearby? Monitor looks great, so that's cool. I want this over shield 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 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 $100. 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 why these performance differences were so wide.