Core i3 2120 vs 3240. Does it even matter which I choose?

[ITemplate]

Hi,

Building a low-medium computer and I have to choose from:

2120 on a ASRock H61M-PS4.
or
3240 on a ASRock P75 Pro3.

In any case, the GFX will be a AMD HD-7850. When talking about gaming, will it matter what CPU/MB I choose? Or is the difference theoretical...

Thanks.

--
ITemplate

 

[13thmonkey]

3240 as it is a true quad core

 

[dwatterworth]

Go with the P75 motherboard. It has a much longer feature set that will give you better gaming performance.
B75 chipset supports the ivy bridge series chips by default along with 1600mhz DDR3 and PCIe 3.0 natively. The H61 belongs to the Sandy bridge generation of chips which by default are set to 1333mhz DDR3 and PCIe 2.0. The PCIe 2.0 won't bottleneck the 7850 GPU you are getting but the 3240 will be faster especially when combined with faster memory.

Another reason for P75 motherboard is that the Ivy bridge 3240 is both 100 mhz higher than the 2120 and Ivy Bridge is roughly 10% faster than sandy bridge in regards to per-clock performance.

Both chips are dual core processors with hyperthreading, presenting 4 threads to an OS.

If you plan on getting a SSD drive at any time, B75 supports SATA 3 versus H61 supporting SATA 2, so B75 on the P75 motherboard can hit double the storage system speeds.
The B75 on the P75 motherboard will also have 2 usb 3.0 ports compared to H61 supporting 0 USB 3.0 ports natively.

 

[13thmonkey]

agree with ^ the intel naming conventions are starting to confuse me.

 

[ITemplate]

Thanks guys, P75 + 3240 it is then.