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Best Value CPU

Dranzer

Dranzer

Dranzer

Associate
Joined
19 Apr 2012
Posts
80
I want to know which CPU is the best for value, my budget is less than £90.
I will be doing gaming mainly, games such as BF3 and GW2.
 
You really do need to be more specific. Gaming is predominately bound by the GPU.

As CEUOTC says you need to give a LOT more detail. Each range of CPU whether they are intel 1155/6 (i3, i5, i7) or AMD: AM3, FM1 etc they are all good for something. Each have their pro's and con's.

CAT-THE-FIFTH has helped me previously over on other forums - I believe he operates here as well.
 
If you haven't bought the board yet the i3-2100 is the way to go, and since it's non-clockable you can save even more by buying a H61 board.
 
£90 for a CPU is not easy, but the more cores you have and the more you can overclock the better.... the i3 is a great CPU and core for core faster @ stock than an FX-4100. yet it only has 2 cores and is very limited in overclocking, the FX has 4 cores and is fully overclockable, if you can spare another £25 at a later date for an aftermarket CPU cooler it will crank up to 4.5Ghz, also more and more newer games will use all of the FX 4 cores as opposed to the i3's 2, plus AMD Motherboards which allow that overclocking are dirt cheap.... add all that up.... for me it makes the better £90 CPU.
 
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humbug said:
£90 for a CPU is not easy, but the more cores you have and the more you can overclock the better.... the i3 is a great CPU and core for core faster @ stock than an FX-4100. yet it only has 2 cores and is very limited in overclocking, the FX has 4 cores and is fully overclockable, if you can spare another £25 at a later date for an aftermarket CPU cooler it will crank up to 4.5Ghz, also more and more newer games will use all of the FX 4 cores as opposed to the i3's 2, plus AMD Motherboards which allow that overclocking are dirt cheap.... add all that up.... for me it makes the better £90 CPU.
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Gaming performance the FX-4100 is far behind the dual-core i3 2100. i3 2100 is on par with Phenom II X4 970BE (3.7GHz) with all 4 cores used by game (i.e. In BFBC2, BF3), but without the shortcoming of in games that use less than 4 cores and losing performance. The FX4100 overclocked to 4.5GHz is only on par with Phenom II X4 at around 3.7-3.8GHz on gaming performance, but still with the same shortcoming of in games uses less than 4 cores, plus the extra cost of needing to get a decent CPU cooler and higher temp and power consumption.
 
Martini1991 said:
The 1155 at this present moment has the better upgrade path as PD's an unknown quantity.
PCI-E 3.0, etc
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If he's spending £90 on a CPU I can't see any graphics card he's using being bottlenecked by PCI-E 2.0.

OP, what graphics card do you have? If you don't have a particulary good one then see if you can get the best Llano CPU you can afford or hold on for Trinity. i3's integrated graphics are poor.
 
this is a good article covering the performance of the cpu's in that price range along with more expensive ones, if you arent bothered about overclocking or do anything other than gaming, you can almost get a cpu and motherboard for 90 quid in the form of the pentium chips that outperforms almost all of the amd chips, possibly leaving more for gfx card. Even overclocked there doesnt seem to be much in it. Those pentiums seem incredible value.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-fx-pentium-apu-benchmark,3120.html
 
Aye true however l am covering all points as the OP may not have much of a budget, so this way the OP can get a mobo+cpu+ram for a little more over the budget.

Regards.

C.
 
Mr. May said:
if you go second hand you could get an i7 920
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This ^^^

And i do wish people would stop putting to much stock into that linked Toms Hardware link posted in the thread.... the fact of the mater is the i3, FX-4, FX-6 and PHII are bottle necking the **** out of the 7970 they used with those benchmarks, and if your spending £90 on a CPU your not going to pair it with a £400 GPU now are you?

AS for BF3, its the wild card in that it uses the CPU far less, that's why a stock i5 2400 is identical in performance as a 2500K running at 4Ghz.

Despite this i have seen no end of people go cheap on the CPU so they have the money to buy that top end GPU thinking they can play BF3 maxed on said card with a dual core i3 or a 4 core Phenom II and what not.... (no doubt after reading Toms Hardware) only to then find actually they are getting horrible frame rates while there £400 GPU is yawning (absolutely including the i3 just as much)

Be it Toms benches there utter rubbish or BF3's 4 or 5 patches later being a completely different game those tiles do not match reality...

The fact is you cannot push one of the most powerful GPU's there is to its limits with a mid range 4 core AMD or in the i3's case a locked 2 core no mater how much of an Intel hardened fan you are.

Get the used Intel i7 920 if you can find one for your money, its a great CPU.

If not make sure you get as many overclockable cores as you can because few things now run on 1or 2 cores and 2 locked cores are no match for 4 overclocked cores no mater how much idiotic evidence they throw at you.

That i3 is a fraction the performance of my 4Ghz 1090T in the things i do with it, hell a 2500K @ 4.5Ghz struggles to keep up with it in half those tasks, and no, what i do is not so different to what most people do, so shake your heads, have a coffee and stop idealizing Intel so much.

Some times i read some things around places like this and i can't help but think (Hook line and Sinker)

Intel have some good advantages, Floating point for example, and Floating point, not to mention Floating point... that gives Intel the edge in single or very low threaded games and some old low threaded software, and even then on a 'reasonable' GPU you hardly notice those advantages. if however you want to spend more than £250 on a GPU then fine, a 2500K / 3570K is the chip for you, certainly not an i3.
 
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