First of all you should just check this video out if only for the hilarious presentation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Hy-1RaI6Mc

And second, i guess i need to say, oh golly i'm wrong. Overclocking and K chips are death for the average gamer. (?)

I knew i should have picked the i7 instead of that k'd i5 to get a couple of more cores that seem demanded by some of those weird grand strat games i used to enjoy when i was 15!

Actually the better deals might be the 10400 & 10600 CPUs, since Intel seems to be discounting these to get rid of old stock.

You missed the part at the very start of the video where he mentions that the video limits itself to only those 2 CPUs and doesn't take into account anything else. Which is correct, if you have to choose between only 11400 and 11600, then I agree that the 11400 is the better option.

Intel's Core i5-11400F is incredibly good value for money except you need a motherboard too and they are scarce for some reason, leading to high prices :-( and then you should get a cooler, no need for anything super fancy but still.

When/if you can get a decent motherboard for the same price as a B550 for a Ryzen it looks like a good buy.

Of course you can buy a brand pc off the shelf with an extra tiny cooler and the CPU and RAM speeds locked low and single channel too. Then you can be angry at the people saying the CPU was good even though you are getting bad performance.

The best choice is... waiting for Alder Lake, IMHO. It should arrive later this year.

oh im subbed to this guy

isnt amd better atm?

I've never had anything but a "K" intel CPU, and also an i7 (in the last 11 years), so I'm very biased and completely right in my choices.

Note: Will pick an AMD next fo' sho'.

The problem is though that we are way past the peak at what OCing added for value for money in a linear manner. Eg, I used to own a Celeron 366 and OC'd that +50% to 550MHz with no extra cost beyond having to buy a larger CPU cooler for £12 (+50% performance for +10% cost). Today though, by the time you've added up the premium for unlocked K chips, Z boards, greater cooling capacity, it can easily end up more than buying the next locked CPU up / same locked CPU but next GPU up.

Example:-

A - £198 i5-10600K + £160 Z490 + £50 water-cooler = £408

B - £125 i5-10400F + £100 B460 + £30 212 EVO = £255

C - £225 i7-10700F + £100 B460 + £30 212 EVO = £355

If you use a PC for a mixed workload, eg, a lot of video editing in addition to gaming, then C starts to make more sense over A. Similarly if you play heavy games, the extra £153 saved on B vs A will make far more of a noticeable difference in games if it means buying the next 1-2 tier GPU up (eg, i5-10400F + RTX 2060 vs i5-10600K + GTX 1650 or i5-10400F + RTX 2070 vs i5-10600K + GTX 1660) for the same money than a +10-15% overclock will.

So in that respect it is true that since overclocking became a "Gamer Industry" in itself (instead of the added value for nothing it used to be) there's often enough of a price premium that you have to weigh up that vs comparing the next non-K CPU / GPU up once everything is factored in, and the people who really gain the most without compromise are those who already own top-end GPU's / are buying an 8-core CPU.

Let's be honest here - processors mostly overclock themselves in this day and age with turbo boost, TVB and other weird self-amping behavior marketing coins. Sure, you can push it even higher than that, but even during the factory turbo boost, the gains are pretty much diminished already.

Why do you think server CPUs focus on core count, not high frequency? The sweet spot for efficiency, meaning performance vs power consumption and heat output, is nowhere near the top marketed frequency of a desktop CPU.

IPC gains vastly outpace anything you can otherwise squeeze out of a CPU by upping its clocks. It's mostly a territory for hardware enthusiasts to mess with either competitively or just have fun. CPU overclocking makes little sense for gaming these days.

One can always wait and wait for future improvements but Alder Lake (Intel's next generation) should come with huge improvements for some tasks with its added Arm cores (yup, Arm as in what Apple and almost all mobiles are using). Not sure if those will impact gaming at all except may decrease power draw a tad.

The Core i5 and upwards, but NOT Core i3 and downwards, of the 11k series do have improved IPC.

Looking at local prices, I would not try to save a mere €28 in order to lose up to 20% speed and PCIe 4.0.

Agreed. It also wasn't that long ago that Intel K's were only about £10 more vs identical non K, (I remember buying a £180 i5-3570K over a £170 i5-3570), and that Z170 premium ASUS ITX boards that used to be £110 have now soared to nearer £200-£300 for Z490 / Z590 ITX boards (whilst B150 MATX boards that used to be £80 have only increased to £100 for similar class of B460M).

The real "Golden Era" of overclocking was when an i5-2500K could gain a whopping +1.3GHz (+35%) OC vs an i5-2500 (locked to 3.7GHz) if you managed to hit 5.0GHz. Today's i7-10700F / Ryzen 5000's default Turbo up to 4.6-4.8GHz, and same 5GHz target nets just +4-9% gain due to a higher "starting point" which isn't even perceivable in most games, especially with Freesync eliminating both tearing & stutter when the CPU can't hold the maximum monitor capable frame-rate.

you are right it seems, even better priced and able to do the trick just as well. Thank you for this correction there seems to be no sense at all, maybe if your interest lies in more then gaming you might be right Doesn't seem so

phew... what a close call .... almost bought a 10900f , for 347 euro's ! ( the 9900f goes for 310 btw ) managed to pull my finger away just in time

It will be interesting to see where Intel takes the hybrid core approach. I've always been a fan of little-big architectures, but they are tricky to control. There's the potential of saving up power overall, so high performance cores could theoretically boost to even higher frequencies when needed. We'll be in for some interesting developments, I'm sure.

AMD absolutely has the better architecture, unfortunately the current generation 5000 zen CPUs are being sold at absurd prices. :(