First, let me make it clear that when it comes to CPUs, motherboards and RAMI am hopelessly out of date. I was out of date four years ago when I bought my laptop - I just selected component options based on the price. I had no idea what any of the features of the CPU actually did.
So now I need to buy a CPU, motherboard and RAM for the new desktop computer that I am going to build. From web sites I see that you can pay up to a couple thousand dollars for a CPU, so for my first step in the decision making process I drew a line at ~$300 for the CPU. Intel/AMD are going to have to find someone else foolish enough to pay thousands of dollars for a CPU. My current desktop has an AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 4600+ on an ASUS M2NPV-VM motherboard with nVidia video. It is pathetically slow. My laptop has an Intel Core i7-4800 MQ CPU @ 2.7GHz. It is fast enough, but I'd like the new desktop to have something faster, if only to stave off obsolescence. I'm not averse to AMD, but don't their CPUs now come with video built in, and haven't there been some driver issues with Linux? And speaking of video, my current monitor will do 1920x1080 and the ancient nVIDIA on the ASUS motherboard drives it fine. But some day 4K will no longer be cutting edge, so planning ahead for it might be a good idea. Most of what the desktop does is stream internet radio all day long and play over the air tv or movies at night. This is trivial work, but sometimes I rip and encode a Blu-ray movie. On the faster laptop this will take 2-4 hours. I tried it once on the current desktop and it took a day and a half. I use Handbrake for this stuff and while it is working it takes over 90% of the CPU. So I can justify a reasonably fast processor. I asked DuckDuckGo what kind of CPU to get and was presented with a bewildering array of choices. There's i3, 15 and i7, there are cores and threads, there are different GHz ratings, not to mention Kaby Lake, Skylake and even Coffee Lake. (Coffee Lake? So if I get one of these I can just stick a spigot in the case and throw away my coffee maker?) I need a really, really dumbed down explanation, dumber than I have found on the net. _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list PLUG@pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug