i3 4150 for gaming?

[guymarshall]

The i3 4150 has a very low TDP, a quite high clock speed, hyperthreading, a high IPC count, quite a lot of cache for the number of cores, and it is extremely cheap.

Knowing that modern games like Far Cry 4 and Crysis 3 are almost ENTIRELY GPU based, will this CPU be good enough to game at ultra settings at 1080p with an Asus Strix 970?

 

[ubercake]

Far Cry 4 and GTA 5(? whatever the latest is) are two games requiring CPUs with 4+cores. Crysis 3 should run on a dual core (based minimum requirements).

Otherwise, I have an older i3-2100 that most every other game including BF4 runs great on in conjunction with a GTX 960.

 

[mastrom101]

I would strongly recommend an i5 for the types of games you mentioned. AS you can see in this article http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/far-cry-4-benchmark-performance-review,4019-4.html, the i3 does impact performance in games.

The i3 is okay for low-end gaming builds.

 

[nucolos]

If you think an i3 can handle far cry 4, you are gonna have a bad time. It doesnt even work with less than 2 cores, yes you can modded to work, but still you will be bottlenecking you graphics card with that cpu. .For that gpu the best thing would be an i5, i would highly recommend you to save and wait as long as you can to get that one, the cheapest one, it doesnt matter, like the 4440.

 

[guymarshall]

If you think an i3 can handle far cry 4, you are gonna have a bad time. It doesnt even work with less than 2 cores, yes you can modded to work, but still you will be bottlenecking you graphics card with that cpu. .For that gpu the best thing would be an i5, i would highly recommend you to save and wait as long as you can to get that one, the cheapest one, it doesnt matter, like the 4440.

I'm just concerned about heat output because my case doesn't have any fans, and also I don't have a very high budget (most is just the graphics and psu). I guess the i5 4440 isn't that expensive Thanks

 

[ubercake]

Is Far Cry a requirement for you? BF4 does great on an i3. If you can do without Far Cry or other games that are CPU hogs (e.g. GTA5), you should be ok.

Upgrade to an i5 at a later date if you feel the need. I'm just saying, I was thoroughly impressed with the i3s ability to game when I added a GTX 960 to my HTPC.

 

[guymarshall]

Is Far Cry a requirement for you? BF4 does great on an i3. If you can do without Far Cry or other games that are CPU hogs (e.g. GTA5), you should be ok.

Upgrade to an i5 at a later date if you feel the need. I'm just saying, I was thoroughly impressed with the i3s ability to game when I added a GTX 960 to my HTPC.

I will be recording GTA V and Far Cry 4 as well as minecraft with the elgato hd60, so the GPU can record. I might just get the 4690k...

 

[cdrkf]

So much misinformation I don't even... :/ *sigh*

Lets be clear folks... Far Cry 4 requires *4 threads*, and as such you can definitely run the game on an i3, infact in most cases the Haswell i3's perform really close to the lower end i5's due to being clocked higher and the fact HT makes us of the wider core in Haswell (this is why Haswell i3 is so much better in games than say an Ivy i3).

It will even mange Ultra settings with a good enough card:

If you don't beleive me look at this:
http://uk.hardware.info/reviews/6094/37/amd-vs-intel-57-processor-megatest-benchmarks-gtx-960--980-far-cry-4

See how a 4370 is almost as fast as the i5 at 1080p Ultra with a GTX 960. Haswell i3 for gaming is deal of the century!

 

[mastrom101]

So much misinformation I don't even... :/ *sigh*

Lets be clear folks... Far Cry 4 requires *4 threads*, and as such you can definitely run the game on an i3, infact in most cases the Haswell i3's perform really close to the lower end i5's due to being clocked higher and the fact HT makes us of the wider core in Haswell (this is why Haswell i3 is so much better in games than say an Ivy i3).

It will even mange Ultra settings with a good enough card:

If you don't beleive me look at this:
http://uk.hardware.info/reviews/6094/37/amd-vs-intel-57-processor-megatest-benchmarks-gtx-960--980-far-cry-4

See how a 4370 is almost as fast as the i5 at 1080p Ultra with a GTX 960. Haswell i3 for gaming is deal of the century!

I don't think there's any misinformation being spread. Sure, the average frame rate may not be huge (but it still is significant imo), but the min framerate is significantly lower on the i3. For this reason, I simply cannot recommend and i3 for a high end gaming build.

http://media.bestofmicro.com/B/1/470845/gallery/CPU_w_600.png
I think that the link above from Tom's proves what I am saying. I've never heard of harware.info, so I can't speak for the quality of their benchmarks.

 

[cdrkf]

Mastrom, firstly your benchmark shows the i3 keeping acceptable minimums, also that's an ivy i3. Haswell core is 25% wider and as a result the haswell i3s perform quite a bit better as hyperthreading on haswell scales better than on earlier chips. That's why the haswell i3s consistently outrun the best AMD currently have.

I agree that in an ideal world the i5 is better, however if your looking for a decent low power and cost efficient cpu for gaming the new i3s are hard to beat. To put it in perspective I game on an fx8320 and the performance is fine at 1080p and it even handles intensive stuff like the star citizen alpha, a 4000 series i3 is faster on average than the fx.

 

[guymarshall]

Mastrom, firstly your benchmark shows the i3 keeping acceptable minimums, also that's an ivy i3. Haswell core is 25% wider and as a result the haswell i3s perform quite a bit better as hyperthreading on haswell scales better than on earlier chips. That's why the haswell i3s consistently outrun the best AMD currently have.

I agree that in an ideal world the i5 is better, however if your looking for a decent low power and cost efficient cpu for gaming the new i3s are hard to beat. To put it in perspective I game on an fx8320 and the performance is fine at 1080p and it even handles intensive stuff like the star citizen alpha, a 4000 series i3 is faster on average than the fx.

Even though the i3 only has 2 real cores? You would think the 8 core fx 8320 would beat it...

 

[cdrkf]

Mastrom, firstly your benchmark shows the i3 keeping acceptable minimums, also that's an ivy i3. Haswell core is 25% wider and as a result the haswell i3s perform quite a bit better as hyperthreading on haswell scales better than on earlier chips. That's why the haswell i3s consistently outrun the best AMD currently have.

I agree that in an ideal world the i5 is better, however if your looking for a decent low power and cost efficient cpu for gaming the new i3s are hard to beat. To put it in perspective I game on an fx8320 and the performance is fine at 1080p and it even handles intensive stuff like the star citizen alpha, a 4000 series i3 is faster on average than the fx.

Even though the i3 only has 2 real cores? You would think the 8 core fx 8320 would beat it...

Yeah you would, the trouble is that most games don't use more than about 4 threads heavily, and the very wide cores on the i3 mean there is enough headroom left to get 4 cores worth of performance out of it thanks to HT (I mean if you look at the latest benchies there are games where the higher end i3's are faster than the lower i5's despite the core count advantage). The issue is in these scenarios the FX is only acting as a quad core, so the rest of the threads are kinda useless (where the 8320 probably has an advantage is if running streaming software, or other things in the background as there's lots of redundancy left in the CPU to keep those ticking along).

I think the main issue with the FX chips is that they haven't been updated since 2012. They were reasonably competitive against Sandy Bridge cpu's, but Intel is 2 (nearly 3) generations on now. As I say my FX copes with all the games I throw at it for now, and it's possible future DX12 titles will use more of the cores which could prove a real benefit, but in terms of value for money in gaming they're not that great any more.

 

[mastrom101]

Mastrom, firstly your benchmark shows the i3 keeping acceptable minimums, also that's an ivy i3. Haswell core is 25% wider and as a result the haswell i3s perform quite a bit better as hyperthreading on haswell scales better than on earlier chips. That's why the haswell i3s consistently outrun the best AMD currently have.

I agree that in an ideal world the i5 is better, however if your looking for a decent low power and cost efficient cpu for gaming the new i3s are hard to beat. To put it in perspective I game on an fx8320 and the performance is fine at 1080p and it even handles intensive stuff like the star citizen alpha, a 4000 series i3 is faster on average than the fx.

Fair enough