i3 4130 vs i3 2120

[Corex]

I'm building a budget PC. but now I'm a little confused between i3 4130 or i3 2120. I know the 2120 is older but it's also cheaper by 180L.E (26$). and if I got the 2120 I'll also get Gigabyte H61 which is cheaper than H81 by 135L.E (20$) so overall if I got the i3 2120 I'll save 315L.E (45$). which could help me getting 8GB instead of 4GB. I'm not planing for any future upgrade.

My question is there's any real world difference between both?

I'm getting R7 260X.

 

[lightcloud]

Will you be gaming?

If not then go with i3-4130.

 

[plywrlw]

There is a *EDIT moderate difference between the performance of the i3 4130 and the i3 2120 *EDIT but it's not huge really. Whilst the i3 2120 will be OK now it will become obsolete sooner and why go through all the hassle of getting new parts if they become obsolete in a year or so?

On the other hand, if it's going to be a long time until you can afford the extra RAM if you go with the i3 4130 the overall performance improvement will probably be more with the RaM + i3 2120.

Personally, I'd go for Haswell as at least then you get all the features and benefits of the newer motherboards and processors.

Have you considered an AMD build? You might get the performance you want at a price you like (gosh how cheesy!)

 

[Corex]

Yes I'll be gaming (BF4,BF3,Farcry3,etc..) on 720p. I don't care much about graphics. I care about my fps is 45+

but not only gaming, I also do coding and surfing the web. I use PC everyday, 6+ hours a day.

 

[lightcloud]

Yes I'll be gaming (BF4,BF3,Farcry3,etc..) on 720p. I don't care much about graphics. I care about my fps is 45+

but not only gaming, I also do coding and surfing the web. I use PC everyday, 6+ hours a day.

Hmm, I think the best choice would be the 4130 but then you wouldn't get 8GB of RAM. I think you can get the 4130 and wait till you have the money to buy the 8GB RAM.

 

[plywrlw]

Yes, the Haswell i3 4130 will be better for Battlefield. What's your budget and country? Are you willing to consider the AMD route?

P.S. If your H61 motherboard will have 4 RAM slots then get 2x 2Gb and then buy another 2x 2Gb later. If it only has 1 RAM slot you will have to get 1x 4Gb and run in single channel mode until you can buy anither 1x 4Gb

EDIT I meant H81 motherboard, duh! And I don't actually know of any with 4 RAM slots. In my country though there are B85 boards that are the virtually the same price as H81 and those do and have more features.

 

[logainofhades]

Go with a 4130, H81 board, and a single 4gb stick of ram. Once you can, get a matching 4gb stick.

 

[jaguarskx]

For each generation after Sandy Bridge (2nd gen) Core i3/i5/i7 CPU, the average performance increase; assuming the same clock speed; is on average 6%. Haswell is the 4th generation. This means that the Haswell Core i3 running at 3.4GHz would be about equal to a Sandy Bridge Core i3 running at 3.8GHz. Therefore, the average performance difference between the i3-2120 and the i3-4130 is about 15%.

Overall for games, that extra 15% performance would not be really noticeable since most games are bottlenecked by the GPU. But for games that are very CPU pendent, you could see up to a 10% increase in actual frame rate.

If you were doing something that is very CPU dependent like video encoding, then a 15% increase in performance could be very noticeable especially if it is a long video. For example, a video that takes 60 minutes to encode with the i3-2120 would be done in an estimated 51 minutes.

For coding, you will likely not see too much of a difference in performance unless you are developing a very complex program that takes a long time to compile.

The biggest performance difference between Sandy Bridge and Haswell CPUs would be the integrated graphic.But since most gamers install graphic cards in their PCs, the performance of the integrated graphics is not an issue.

 

[logainofhades]

Wouldn't the IGP performance matter though with regards to quicksync?

 

[jaguarskx]

Wouldn't the IGP performance matter though with regards to quicksync?

Only if you are encoding video (since that's what quicksync is for) and only if the encoding program you use supports quicksync. Personally, the programs that I use to encode video do not support quicksync. Additionally, I have not done any research into determining quicksync video quality compared to codecs / programs that solely relies on the CPU.

Like everyone who encodes video, faster encoding is better than slow encoding. However, I want the highest video quality as possible (given certain limitations), if I need to sacrifice a bit of time to get that certain level of quality, then I will.