

(A 32-core Threadripper is about £1,500 and absolutely not worth the difference.) Something in the top 60 should be OK, bearing in mind that my cheap ( £170) Core i5-8400 is still in 37th place, until Intel’s 10th-generation Comet Lake chips push it down a bit. Something in the top 25 would be great, if you can afford it. Notebookcheck’s comparison of mobile processors provides a rough guide to the relative performance of more than 1,400 processors. From the AMD Zen range, the Ryand 2700X (both 8C/16T) seem to be good value, while the Ryand 2600X (both 6C/12T) offer lots of threads for a low price. The older Core i7-8700K and the classic Core i7-7700 still perform well if you can get them at a discount. The eight-core Intel Core i7-9700 is the first choice at this level. For consumers, eight is a very good number. For most purposes, including video editing and gaming, it’s generally better to have faster cores (more GHz) rather than more slower cores. Today, Intel’s Core i9-9900K and AMD’s Ryzen 7 2700X have eight cores and 16 threads, while the Ryzen Threadripper 2 2990WX has 32 cores and 64 threads. Not so long ago, “dual core” chips were a thing, and then we got cores that could run two threads at once.

Most people do not need a fast processor most of the time, but when I’m processing videos, all six cores in my Core i5-8400 run at close to 100% for extended periods. Photograph: Intel Corporationīuy the fastest processor you can afford, and in general, the more cores the better.
