The best budget gaming processor
Intel Pentium G4560
+Still games fine with moderate GPUs
+Runs on Intel's latest LGA1151 platform
-No overclocking support or Turbo modes
-Only dual-core, but Hyper-Threading helps
Suppose you're not planning on building the fastest gaming rig on the planet—you just want something that won't break the bank. Among other things, that means you're not likely to stuff in an expensive graphics card, which means gaming performance is limited by your GPU of choice. The good news is that not only can you save money, you don't even have to sacrifice all the modern features in the process—and power requirements can be quite a bit lower.
The question is which CPU is best: Pentium G4560, Core i3-7100, Athlon X4 860K, or FX-6300? Those are the most promising budget CPUs, ranging from around $70 / £63 to $120 / £110 in price, which is a pretty wide gamut, but differences in performance can be pretty large. For gaming purposes, choosing between these chips actually ends up being pretty easy.
SPECS
Cores: 2
Hyper-threading: Yes
Base Clock: 3.5GHz
Turbo Clock: N/A
Typical OC: N/A
L3 Cache: 3MB
TDP: 54W
PCIe 3.0 lanes: 16
The Pentium G4560 isn't super fast, but it's still clocked at 3.5GHz, and it's the cheapest Intel CPU with Hyper-Threading around. You give up AVX instruction support, and a few other advanced features like Optane Memory, but those won't really affect gaming performance. It can become a bottleneck in more demanding scenarios, but if you're looking at a $100-$200 graphics card, saving $60 on your CPU to upgrade to a faster GPU is a good plan.
G4560 is only 10 percent slower than an overclocked i7-5930K, a CPU that costs nearly ten times as much.
Think of this as the stepping stone for a gaming system. You can run any current game, and down the road you have multiple upgrade options: Core i5-7600K is our best overall pick, Core i7-7700K if you want additional non-gaming performance, and in 2018 Coffee Lake should offer 6-core overclockable CPUs on LGA1151.
Passmark benchmark
Intel Pentium G4560 @ 3.50GHz Average CPU Mark : 5093
Description: Intel HD Graphics 610
Socket: FCLGA1151
Clockspeed: 3.5 GHz
No of Cores: 2 (2 logical cores per physical)
Typical TDP: 54 W
Other names: Intel(R) Pentium(R) CPU G4560 @ 3.50GHz![1.png]
CPU First Seen on Charts: Q1 2017
CPUmark/$Price: 81.68 Overall Rank: 575
Last Price Change: $62.36 USD (2017-02-06)
Single Thread Rating: 1992
Samples: 850*
*Margin for error: Low
(
)
As we can see on the Passmark graphs Performance isn't bad at all and it tops perforance per dollar!!!
I tend to recommend around a 2:1 ratio on cost of GPU vs. CPU, meaning a GTX 1050 Ti or RX 560 would be a great pairing for a modest gaming solution. Performance is respectable for a sub-$100 part, and if you're doing a true budget build there's no need to put more money into your processor.
Since there's also no official support for overclocking, you can also look at motherboards with the H110/H170/H270 chipsets, and decent models start at not much more than $50 / £50, with well-equipped ATX boards under $100 / £100. Just keep in mind that if you plan on upgrading to a Core i5 or i7 part later, you might want to invest in a better motherboard.
The biggest concern with Intel's Pentium processors is future games that may start putting additional CPU cores to better use. We've seen this with Ashes of the Singularity and Hitman, and if DX12 really catches on in the next couple of years a 2-core/4-thread chip could become a liability. But given the price, we'd take that risk—you can always upgrade to a faster CPU in the future if it becomes necessary.
Source 1 ---> www.pcgamer.com
Source 2 ---> www.cpubenchmark.net