eTeknix Christmas Hardware Buying Guide

The best Processors for Christmas

There is a huge amount of choice when it comes to processors, AMD and Intel offer many different processors at different price points. We have decoded the complex mess that is the processor market to come up with recommendations for each major price point.

£50+ price point

At £50 there isn’t that much money can buy in terms of high performance but you can still pick up offerings from both AMD and Intel which would make a decent system. On the Intel side at the £50 price point we would recommend the LGA 1155 Pentium G620 as the best processor. Coming in at £47 it is certainly well priced and it beats the older LGA 775 generation of dual cores by quite a substantial margin as well as surpassing AMD’s Athlon II dual core processors.

However, if you have an extra £10 to spare you can pick up an AMD Athlon II 455 triple core processor. Retailing at about £60 this processor packs enough punch to match and surpass the Pentium G620 in most tests and offers you the extra functionality of a third core. It is also worth noting AM3 boards are often significantly cheaper than LGA 1155 so you could probably make that £10 back quite easily.

We would recommend: Athlon II X3 455 and a cheap AM3 based system.

£100+ price point

At £100 AMD loses some ground on Intel not really being able to offer any significant performance increases over the cheaper Athlon II processors which hit the £50 price point. Intel offers a particularly powerful processor at the £100 price point, the i3 2120 offers substantial CPU performance for just £96 the only real downside is if you do not intend to pair this processor with some form of graphics card you may notice this processor is particularly weak in gaming as the Intel HD 2000 graphics offered are not particularly powerful.

This is where AMD comes in with the APU series. For £105 you can get a processor which performs about 10% faster in CPU tasks than the Athlon II 455 processor mentioned earlier but with the addition of discrete class graphics  The A8-3850 in comparison to the i3 2120 gives gaming performance that is about 200% better than what an i3 2120 can offer in games. So if you want to do gaming on a budget the A8-3850 is the processor for you.

We would recommend: A8-3850 if you haven’t much to spend on a graphics card. I3 2120 if you have £50 or more to spend on a discrete video card.

£150 + price point

At the £150 price point things start to get competitive. Intel offers the extremely tried and trusted 2500K at around £160 which offers significantly faster performance in terms of gaming than any other processor it has ever produced before . The unlocked multiplier allows users to easily overclock this processor to 4.5GHz (and beyond) on air cooling and further increase its performance. However, this is an enthusiast chip, you need to pair it with a graphics card otherwise you cannot fully realise the fantastic performance gains it has to offer in games.

In terms of AMD’s equivalent to the 2500K price point they can offer the FX 8120 8 core Bulldozer based CPU. Also retailing at about £160 the FX 8120 offers very good gaming performance and overclocking. However, it falls short of the the performance of the 2500K by a margin on average of about 10-30% (when paired with the same video card at equivalent frequencies), it consumes significantly more power and overclocking requires better cooling equipment as it runs with much hotter temperatures.

We would recommend: The 2500K every time, paired with a GTX 550Ti/ HD 6850 or better.