Core i3 4170?

[lumencreative]

Building a new PC for a showroom. Sales staff will be using to browse our website with customers present and to put orders on our warehouse system.

PC will have a 120GB SSD but just wondering whether a Core i3 4170 would be a good choice. Originally quoted for a Core i5 4460 but can save £50 by giong down the i3 route.

Any thoughts?

 

[Kurgen]

i3 will be fine, especially when paired with an SDD

 

[Kurgen]

im sure this would do the job as well..

YOUR BASKET
1 x Intel Pentium K Anniversary G3258 Socket LGA1150 Processor - Retail £55.99
Total : £64.69 (includes shipping : £7.25 Ex.VAT).

 

[Sandycheeks]

Don't underestimate how good the i3s are for office type stuff.
I use an old one on a daily basis (540 I think) and it's pretty spectacular considering the work we throw at it !
I have no experience with the Pentium K but think it would be fine for your needs.

 

[Sandycheeks]

an AMD A8 6600K would be fine also on a cheap board.(about £74 CPU + £45 MOBO)
Even a A6 6400K dual core would be suitable...in my opinion.(about £40 for CPU)

 

[DragonQ]

Don't underestimate how good the i3s are for office type stuff.
I use an old one on a daily basis (540 I think) and it's pretty spectacular considering the work we throw at it !
I have no experience with the Pentium K but think it would be fine for your needs.

I dunno, Core i3s seem pretty pointless. Office machines will be perfectly fine with Celerons or Pentiums, whereas most workstations or gaming machines will need Core i5s or i7s.

 

[Sandycheeks]

I dunno, Core i3s seem pretty pointless. Office machines will be perfectly fine with Celerons or Pentiums, whereas most workstations or gaming machines will need Core i5s or i7s.

My experience of the i3 is that it copes remarkably well with having various programmes open all at once such as...
Autocad, multiple PDFs, multiple Excel Docs, multiple internet browser windows, Hilti software, Outlook, Word, maybe a couple of other things also.

I can't say that the celerons and pentiums etc.. would cope as I have no experience with them.

FYI - the i3 540 is old now and still flies along nicely with 0 issues - ever !
I was getting a few random fatal errors a while back (whilst working in 3D CAD or insanely large CAD files) so upped from 4GB to 8GB of ram and all is well again.

 

[Kurgen]

im using an i3-2310 in a laptop and performs fine with Autocad as well.. I would always steer clear of Celerons... think Celeron think Celery... thats about as much use as they are

 

[Gambisk]

I dunno, Core i3s seem pretty pointless. Office machines will be perfectly fine with Celerons or Pentiums, whereas most workstations or gaming machines will need Core i5s or i7s.

I've been gaming on a i3-3240 for 4 years now, and it handles the majority of games really well. I'm not claiming its comparable to an i5 or the like but I've never come across it causing big issues in any games, including GTAV and BF4 that I play regularly. Definitely worthy of a place in any budget rig.

 

[DragonQ]

Celerons have a bad reputation because they were crap in the days of the Pentium 4, etc. That was 10+ years ago. A Pentium is basically a Core i3 without HyperThreading and a Celeron is just a Pentium with a smaller L3 cache.

Yes, Core i3s are faster in certain scenarios (multithreaded stuff in particular) but I just don't think they're worth the extra money over super-cheap Pentiums and Celerons in most cases (unless you really need the AVX or AES extensions). Otherwise, if you really need that multithreaded grunt, a low-end Core i5 would surely be better value?

EDIT: I'm not really using OcUK's pricing here, since the i5-4440 is £152 and I got one for £120 a year ago.