[PLUG] CPU info needed

[John Jason Jordan]

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and RAMI am hopelessly out of date. I was out of date four years ago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.