Best Gaming CPUs For The Money: January 2012 (Archive)

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the kaveri apus have finally come down to tolerable price points. not as gaming cpus (to be combo'd with powerful dgfx) but as general purpose apus to be used in small cases. otoh, amd is messing with customers by labelling richland apus with 7xxx model numbering.
 
I feel like soon they really need to start leveling these out more instead of having pretty much every Core i5 and Core i7 Intel has made since Sandy Bridge and some of the highest end Core i7 CPUs from the 1st Gen all in the same category. Really the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th gen i5 and i7 CPUs should be two separate groups at least and several other areas are similar. It just really feels it should be spaced out better like how the GPU charts are done to give a more accurate chart.
 
I still want to see a definitive article on potential stuttering issues with the G3258 before recommending it for gaming.

I also strongly agree with the sentiment that the top tier of Intel CPUs needs to be stretched into two or even three tiers.
Side-by-side, my FX-8320 is not within a single tier of my I5-3570K; no way no how.
 

Rahbot

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Why do you insist on using just Intel CPU's for this, not everyone can afford the high end quad cores... You should post best AMD and then Intel at price range.
 
Rahbot, this is a Best CPU for the Money listing. For the general case (to which this applies), AMD vs. Intel is irrelevant. For a given budget, the best CPU is listed, no matter who makes it. About the only special cases you'll encounter is those few extremely well-threaded titles, in which case an AMD FX offering may have a small advantage due to its extra threads.
Rayden, there are so many variables here (silicon lottery, quality of motherboard, quality of cooler, quality of PSU, skill of overclocker) that it is hard to estimate. I'd add at least one tier though, maybe two.
 

Rahbot

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Ya but for the money most if not all Intel CPU's aren't really worth the money in my eyes. If its not worth the money, then I don't buy it... That's why I get AMD's over Intel.. My friend buys Intel CPU's and he wonders why my AMD works better than his Intel counterparts. We run about the same system, and do about the same thing. But he pays more for his systems. We both agree that if we were Millionaires that buying a Intel 6+ Core with 32GB+ of ram and 1K+ GPU's with SSD's in RAID is worth it for what we do.... but I make less than my friend and I still get better FPS in games, I also use Nvidia and he mostly uses ATI/AMD Cards but he is going to make the switch to Nvidia soon, and maybe we will see that Intel does better with a Nvidia GPU. On the other hand we will see what Nvidia will do with his Intel i7-4770k. Note I run a FX-8320 AMD CPU with Nvidia's GTX 770, 16GB of Memory, Black ED Hard drives, with Green drives for data storage. Also we run @ Stock or small OC's on our systems.
 

imamon

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Each and every cpu mentioned here is at least $10 to $15 more in India. Probably the innumerable taxes so once the cost of all the components add up, the difference in cost of a single system build on pcpartpickers and Indian market is enough to make a grown person cry :(

And if you could please update the cpu hierarchy list? Why all the generations of intel 4th generation i5 and i7 whatchamacallits cramped together in a single or two tiers along with their predecessors?
 
Still waiting for the CPU Hierarchy Chart to get updated
8373718.jpg
 

freakysqeeky

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Just wanted to point out the Technical Specifications for the 5930k has ddr3 down as the memory it supports.
Its ddr4 not to confuse anyone. And that's pretty easy to do with the hardware today.
 

Mac266

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Couple of issues with the 5930k recommendation.

First, to do with the memory. It supports DDR4 1333/1600/2133.

Second, The socket is 2011-v3
 

Gurg

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need to update the games tested or include a few more newer titles.

If they did that then the 4790k and 5930K would both be at less than 100% as the best performer in the Haswell E review was the 5820K. The 5820k beat the 4790k in 4/7 games at 2560x1440, The 5820k beat the 5930k in 6/7 games. None of those games are used in this recommendation, though I would be curious to see how the 5820k compared in the games actually used for this article.
 

Mac266

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What GPU is he running? Because an i7 4770k is far and away better than a 8320.
 

MrChain

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Should correct " little reason to buy a 4460 or i-7 unless you plan to over clock". 4460 should be 4690k to malloe sense...
 

belardo

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At microcenter... its best to get the i5-4690K because they sell it for $200 + $50 off motherboard... so I got the GIGABYTE GA-H97N-WIFI ($120 on newegg) for about $65 ($265 for CPU + motherboard = off shield - no rebates). On newegg, that would be $345.

AMD is just not on the list... :(
 

boogereaterpicker

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The Intel Pentium G3258 should be removed from the CPU charts as it lacks Hyper Threading and only has 2 cores, some of the newer games will not run on a pure dual core processor, Far Cry 4 and Dragon Age Inquisition are the latest examples.
 
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