Core i3-7100

• - Not noticeably slower than i5-7600K in most games
• - 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 decent that won't break the bank. Among other things, that means you're not likely to stuff in an expensive graphics card, which means games are even more likely to be limited by your GPU of choice. The good news is that not only can you save money, you don't even have to sacrifice 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 equally large.

For gaming purposes, choosing between these chips actually ends up being pretty easy. AMD's Athlon X4 860K is basically the same as their A10-7870K, only without the integrated GPU. It's the slowest of the three chips, with the i3-7100 beating it by around 25 percent in gaming performance—and that's using a GTX 980 graphics card (RX 480 and GTX 1060 would perform similarly). The i3-7100 likewise beats the FX-6300 by around 10 percent, at significantly lower power use, and thus claims the budget CPU crown. In short, if you want a budget AMD CPU, wait for Ryzen 5 (or wait even longer for Ryzen 3); otherwise the i3-7100 is a great budget choice.

The Pentium G4560 is a bit of a wild card. It's not super fast, but it's still clocked at 3.5GHz, and it's the cheapest Intel CPU with Hyper-Threading around. But you give up AVX instruction support, and a few other advanced features, the biggest being Optane Memory. 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 worth doing.

Dropping down to Intel's Core i3 line ends up being an interesting compromise in features. You lose two of the CPU cores found in the i5-7600K, along with half the L3 cache, but Hyper-Threading is enabled giving you two logical cores to go with the physical cores. Turbo Boost is also disabled, so the chip runs at a steady 3.9GHz under load—a smidge higher than the base clock of the 7600K, but lower than the turbo clock.

There's also no official overclocking support, and while ASRock did enable a form of overclocking with their Z170, you're generally better of just getting the 7600K and calling it a day. The i3-7100 does drop the TDP down from 91W to 51W, however, with is pretty significant.

The good news is that even with all the above changes, performance ends up being quite respectable. I haven't tested an i3-7100 in our gaming suite, but the slightly faster i3-7350K paired with a GTX 1080 is still only 10 percent slower on average compared to the i5-7600K. Knock off another five percent for the i3-7100's lower clockspeed and reduced L3 cache, and you're still in business, particularly with budget GPUs like the GTX 1050 and RX 460. Even using a GTX 980 running 1080p Ultra settings, performance is within ten percent of the more expensive i5-7600K. Not a bad showing at all for Intel's entry-level Core i3 part.

The i3-7100 is almost certainly capable of maxing out a GTX 1050 Ti / R9 380 / RX 460 or lower graphics card in most games. We personally tend to go with around a 2:1 ratio on cost of GPU vs. CPU, though, meaning a GTX 1060 or RX 480 would be a great pairing for a modest gaming solution. 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.

The biggest concern with Intel's Core i3 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 Core i5 or i7 part in the future if it becomes necessary. Or again, go for the G4560 as an entry-level solution and upgrade the CPU later to a Core i5 or i7 if you feel the need.

SPECS

Cores: 2
Hyper-threading: Yes
Base Clock: 3.9GHz
Turbo Clock: N/A
Typical OC: N/A
L3 Cache: 3MB
TDP: 51W
PCIe 3.0 lanes: 16