Sorry for not replying sooner guys, I have been very busy and for some reason I did not get email notifications for replies. So forgot to check back.
The 10100F COULD work, but it's much like having a 6th Gen Skylake i7 and the fact is that those parts are really just not capable enough for a GOOD experience. The 10400F would be a MUCH better choice. It has double the onboard cache (Smart cache), two more physical cores and four more hyperthreads. That would be really the minimum, if buying today, that you'd want to use for a card like that. But it also depends on what you play.
Games that are almost entirely GPU bound don't need extremely powerful processors, while other games will fall flat on their faces if you don't have a CPU that is pretty capable. Also depends on how many frames per second you are trying to stay within range of. For a 60FPS configuration you can get away with a much less capable CPU than for one that you are trying to get at or near 120-144FPS or more.
The only reason for wanting the i3 10100 was it’s attractive price point of $100 + $100 more for a B560 motherboard. With the hope that it would be enough to use together with an RTX2080 that I have, and get pretty much full performance out of it on the “cheap” (due to already having the gpu). With future proofing not really being much of a concern. The ideal FPS would be 1440p 144hz for modern shooters, whilst also 4K 60hz for more adventures-type games.
I agree that the i5-10400 / 10400F is probably the minimum worth considering. A 6-core, 12-thread processor like that should hold up pretty well in current games, and probably nearly all games coming out within at least the next few years, if not longer. A 4-core, 8-thread CPU like the i3-10100 likely isn't going to fare as well in the long term, and there are already a few AAA games that can see some performance instability on a processor like that.
The Ryzen 3600 was also a good option when it was priced more competitively with the 10400, as it often tended to be slightly faster when properly configured with faster memory, but its pricing hasn't been particularly good since the latter part of last year. It's arguably not worth paying that much more for what would be an indistinguishable performance difference in games.
The 2700X does offer a couple more cores compared to the 3600 or 10400, but the vast majority of existing games won't fully utilize them, and each of its cores tend to not perform quite as fast, resulting in slightly lower performance in most of today's (CPU-limited) titles. It's still a decent option if found at the right price, but probably not as good of a value as the 10400 currently.
Yes, however I was looking to get something for like 6 months or so really, without caring to give much thought to any future proofing and only focusing strictly on lowest cost. But without bottlenecking the rtx2080 at all.
Probably worth asking, what other hardware does the system currently have that you feel is limiting the 2080?
I actually don’t have a system for it. I just have loose parts and components which I had planned to sell over a year ago but never did and I left to gather dust (rtx 2080, noctua cpu cooling, corsair psu, ssd, 4k monitor and pc case). So recently, I was hoping to cheaply put it all together into a complete, solid enough system for a few months of playing. As I haven’t gamed in ages and just wanted to enjoy trying some games for a few months at highest settings if possible. But not planing for much more after that really.
I agree the performance was better due to the increase in cores, but the single core performance was still not very good at that time. Zen 2 was leaps ahead of Zen+ in the area of single core performance. But anyhow, any of these might be good choices at certain price points. As you asked, it really depends on what they had before or currently has, if anything, since he indicated he doesn't have a suitable CPU, memory and RAM. But maybe he just means what he has is really, really old.
Still be nice to know what it is for comparative reasons.
It’s just those loose random parts that I have, not a complete system. I do happen to have a normal desktop but it’s never been a gaming one and is very very old for nowadays, so I can’t really put anything together from it (I’m talking i7 860, pcie 2.0, ddr3 etc).
10400f
B460 board of your choosing, or pay additional cash for memory overclocking on a B560, this seems worth it,
Quality ddr4 3200-3600 , 3733 seems to be where the cost becomes prohibitive
a decent psu around 600 watts 650 couldn't hurt ideal would be silverstone/seasonic
A case of your preference
1TB SSD
Thanks. I was really struggling to choose between the i3 10100 and i5 10400f (for $100 and $180 respectively), I only wanted the cheapest possible for not bottlenecking the 2080, nothing more.
Yesterday however, I miraculously happen to get a deal for a ryzen 5 3600 together with an x570 motherboard for just 250 dollars (whereas before a ryzen 5 3600 was $235 alone, and I couldn’t find it cheaper). And considering that it was only 50 dollars more than an i3 10100 + B560 (and with the i5 10400 + B560 being 30 dollars more than the ryzen 5 3600 + x570), I decided it was worth the 50 dollars in case the i3 10100 didn’t manage to hold up to even today’s games. Plus much better value if it ever comes to selling I think.
Thank you all for your input and apologies for the late replies, as I don’t really post on here and therefore I forgot to check back after a day or two.