Shopbot's Official 2020 Buying Guide for Processors

Use Purposes

When building your PC, the main component is the CPU, so let's take a look at some quick purposes of use to get a basic idea of what range is best for you.

Office & Student: the workload is a low strain; the best choice is a low cost, low range CPU. The AMD Ryzen 3 or Intel i3 will best fit your needs in this application.

Gaming: most modern games rely more on the GPU than on the CPU. However, certain games and specific scenarios can get really CPU intensive. The best fit for this application is an AMD Ryzen 5 / Ryzen 7 or an Intel i5 / i7 to be paired with 16GB RAM and a high-end GPU. Head over to our GPU buyers guide to choose the best GPU for you.

Specialized work like graphic design, 3D rendering, video editing and rendering, coding, and other high workloads that demand a lot from your CPU. This high workload will require a high-end CPU like AMD's Ryzen 9, Threadripper or Intel's i9. High core count and hyperthreading are better suited for this work application.

AMD or Intel

AMD vs Intel the most debated question when it comes to processors, so let us try and point out some of the many differences to help you choose between the two.

AMD:  has the upper hand with hardware security of their processors, being a step ahead of intel with their latest product releases. Intel suffered from security exploits that compromise the processors, which has now led them to redesign their security integration.

AMD has also more future-proofed their processors by considering the new technology, like PCIe 4.0, that has recently hit the market using the newer PCIe M.2 hard drives that can obtain speeds of 5GBps reads and 4.3GBps write.

Intel: with their long rain in the limelight has led to some design improvements, and they have a higher thermal throttle limit allowing to push their CPU’s performance limits and overclocking abilities.  

Intel has the upper hand in the single-core speeds. Auto turbo boosts on their processors along with the Intel Optane system can increase performance when paired with the right hardware. Still, the Optane system is only available on the 7^th generation Intel processors.

Pricing

Make sure you get the most bang for buck within your budget and individual needs. This can only be achieved with a real-world test with the types of applications you will be using so you can accurately purchase according to your needs.

Cores & Threads

Hyperthreading only helps with 3 main tasks such as 3D rendering, Video Editing, and heavy multitasking. Hyperthreading is not the same as doubling your processing cores. This better schedule the work to the processing cores that you have; this provides better power consumption and lowers the heat output.

Cores modern PC processors are multicore; the more cores do produce higher processing speed. The other thing to keep in mind is the cache communication between cores. Look for CPUs with a cache level 3, and multicores.

Motherboard

What kind of motherboard are you going for, as this plays a role in the CPU you purchase due to the sockets and the electrical compatibility?

Each brand of CPU has its socket, and this can change for each model and on each generation. So, make sure you do your research on what is compatible with the motherboard you are using.

Features

Speeds and Feeds Processor performance is measured in either MHz or GHz, and this represents the pulses per second produced by the CPU, and this is known as Clock Speed. But clock speed isn't a complete measure of performance, and Efficiency is another factor; this is how much work can be done in each clock cycle. This is measured in terms of instructions per cycle (IPC). A CPU with high clock speed, but low IPC, may not perform as well as a CPU with lower clock speed and high IPC.

Cache this is fast access to memory built into the processor, which stores data in small amounts to be collected faster than it would be to collect from the RAM or hard drive. The speed of the processor depends on this factor, the cache memory is known as levels L1, L2 and L3, fastest being L3 as this can store more on the CPU.

Bandwidth refers to the number of input and output data that can be processed within a clock cycle.

Cooling

TDP Thermal Design Power tells us the maximum amount of heat that component is expected to output. Now, this brings us to the cooling of your CPU as an insufficiently cooled processer will lead to power throttling and lead to damaging the CPU. On the opposite end of the spectrum, if you cool the processor correctly, this can boost performance. So, a high-quality cooling system can help your computer run cooler, quieter, last longer and improve performance.

We at Shopbot hope this was helpful and wish you a happy shopping experience.