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Comment by yboris | Hacker News Reader

I usually go to PassMark CPU charts and sort by value:

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_value_alltime.html

Or visit their high-end CPU chart and scroll until I see a price I'm willing to pay.

There are a lot of 10-year-old used Xeons on that list. Their value proposition might be very different if power consumption was also taken into account.

Prices of those Xeons are low because servers they originally came in got recycled in China aka they are fished out of garbage. Motherboard and older ram make whole proposition less than ideal, picking between old server gear with all the warts or "new" Chinese motherboards build using recycled chipsets and dodgy designs (single channel memory Xeon boards with SATA2 only etc).

Sorting by value is a pretty bad way to decide on what CPU to buy. There are a great deal of other factors that go into performance from things like the cache / memory, integrated GPU, power draw, etc. The Passmark score, while useful, isn't in itself very comprehensive.

How do you decide?

I decide by looking at real world benchmarks for the workloads I'll be using the computer for.

Yeah, this is a good way. Think about what you're going to be doing with the hardware that you want to buy, and then look at how the various items within your price range perform in those specific categories.

I wish they had sort-by-value based on single-threaded scores. (That whole list is full of Intel Xeons that generally have poor single-threaded performance. Single-thread benchmark scores are probably what impact regular desktop users most.) And maybe also a filter to exclude CPUs that are older than N years. And maybe an option to set a minimum core count (like filter out all CPUs with less than 4 physical cores). Then it'd be perfect.

Or maybe some needs to build an automatic UI generator that takes in a database schema, and lets you filter/sort/etc by stuff. It'd be like one of those SQL GUI desktop apps, except we'd have an embeddable client-side React component + a server-side library, instead.

You can sort by single-thread performance if you look only at those cpus, which are still on the market: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_value_available.html#single...

https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/ does this.

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