 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 ARK, 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. TunnelBear is the simple VPN app that makes it easy to browse privately and enjoy a more open internet. To try TunnelBear for free, check out the link in the video description. TLDR. 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 dollars for the G4520's marginal speed improvement, the Core i3-6100 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 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 6400 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 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 gameplays for later upload to YouTube, the Core i7-6700K takes everything that's good about the 6600K 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 TLDR is over, kids. Let's see how we got there. I'm gonna 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 i3-6100 at $117 makes more sense than the i3-6300 at $138 with its barely higher clock speed, extra 1 meg of cache, 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 OEM parts. The Core i5-6400T from the T low power series is a standout here as a 35 watt true quad core at 2.2 to 2.8 GHz for $170. Though we can see that the comparison here is somewhat unfair, because real world pricing of similar chips like the 6500T is way off of Intel's suggested price on ARC. This is pretty normal on these niche SKUs 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, 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 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 too. So you'd lose some of the benefit that you're usually paying extra for in that case. Moving up higher than the 6700K means we're getting into two different territories here, both of which require moving up to the big boy pants socket LGA 2011 3. Prosumer 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 dollar 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 EX class Xeons 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 6800K 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 6700K 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 2011 III core i7s seem to be priced more like high clock speed, high power consumption Xeon SKUs. The 6850K and the 6900K hold their own pretty well against the very similar E5 1650 and E5 1660 if you want to trade ECC support for overclocking. But as for the Xen 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 lower priced LGA 1151 model, it doesn't make as much sense to me as the similarly priced E5 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, which 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 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 6 cores boosted, and only 3.5% 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, single-threaded 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 6700K quad-core, which costs 350 bucks, and the 6950X10 core, which costs 1700, demonstrated, with the 6700K 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-tektips.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. 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