CPUs are sort of like the brains of your computer everything you do on your computer goes through the CPU which makes it an essential part of every PC there are two big manufacturers of desktop CPUs Intel and AMD both manufacturers build CPUs that do the same thing they process information encode it as ones and zeros at incredibly fast speeds make computery things happen that's the goal of every CPU whether it's from AMD or Intel but how each CPU accomplishes those computery goals is a little different first let's take a look at our Intel CPU this is an Intel i5 4690k it's a four core processor with a clock speed of 3.5 gigahertz currently retails for about 240 dollars and it's a CPU we recommend in some of our upper mid-range PC bills over here we have a cpu from Intel's competitor AMD this is the FX 63 50 has six cores clocked to 3.9 big Hertz but even though it has bigger numbers compared to the Intel CPU this processor retails for about half the price and we recommended in some of our lower mid-range computer builds so what's the deal judging by the numbers you might assume that the AMD CPU would be better than the Intel after all it has more cores on a higher clock speed bigger numbers are always better right unfortunately it's more complicated than that despite having fewer cores that run at a lower frequency this Intel CPU uses a more advanced architecture that makes it more efficient and lets it perform better than the AMD CPU so what do the numbers mean if they don't tell us how good the CPU is going to be this is where things get a little tricky this Intel CPU has four cores you can think of cores kind of like workers where one core equals one worker one worker can get done one unit of work so two workers should be able to get done two units of work right unfortunately in reality it never quite works out that way two workers can get done somewhere between one and two units work depending on the process they're working on so with the process that's easily broken up into multiple tasks like video editing you can take advantage of a lot of course many other processes however are not optimized to use multiple cores to make things even more complicated this AMD CPU that we said had six cores well it actually kind of has six cores or kind of has three cores depending on what it's doing it's more like three workers who can often do the work of six workers we don't want to complicate things too much basically think of a core as a worker clock speed determines how fast the workers can get tasks done a higher clock speed means tasks get done faster as long as we're talking about raising or lowering the clock speed on the same CPU for example if this AMD CPU that's running at 3.9 gigahertz was instead running at five gigahertz it would do that work faster however clock speed comparisons don't really work between two CPUs built with different architectures such as this AMD CPU in this Intel CPU you can't take these two CPUs and predict that one will perform better simply based on the higher clock speed we could compare this FX 6350 to an FX 6300 with basically the same architecture running at a lower clock speed and assume that the 6350 will be faster in that case so if you're really confused right now don't despair there is actually a way to figure out which CPU is going to work well for you the best way to figure out what CPU to buy is to compare real-world performance benchmarks or get recommendations from knowledgeable sources here's an example of a benchmark from Anandtech that compares our FX 63 50 and our i5 4690k these are direct measurements of how well the CPUs perform in real-world applications in this x264 benchmark we can see how fast these two CPUs encode video our FX 6350 encodes at about 81 frames per second while the i5 4690k can do about 122 these numbers are directly comparable you know that you're going to be encoding x264 video the Intel CPU is about 50% faster for another comparison here's a benchmark of each CPU playing Battlefield 4 with a GTX 770 graphics card as you can see the 6350 average is about 59 frames per second and the 4690k average is 61 since they're so close in performance here if you're building a PC that will mostly be used to play battlefield 4 it might make sense to save some money and go with the FX 6350 of course people like us do this all day so if you don't want to get into this level of research you can check with the reliable source we'll include some links in the video description below generally speaking if you just want to use your computer for browsing the web word processing playing old PC games or watching YouTube and Netflix you'll be fine with a low end CPU in the 25 to 100 dollar range moderately priced CPUs ranging from a hundred to two hundred and fifty dollars are usually good for more intense tasks such as playing the newest PC games streaming games on Twitter YouTube or editing videos with professional software these mid-range CPUs tend to be the best value for your money and most of the CPUs we recommend would be considered mid-range you should probably only consider a really high end CPU above the 250 dollar range if you plan on doing something really intensive like 4k game recording 4k video editing really serious design work or production work or some other tasks that requires a Aion CPU if you buy a more powerful CPU than you actually need you might get a little extra performance but you'll experience greatly diminishing returns on your investment since the CPU is central to your computer's performance you definitely want to get one powerful enough for what you want to do but think about how you want to use your computer and do your research to make sure you're not spending more than necessary you want to learn more about CPUs
