Intel Core i3 7100 Enough for Gaming?

[Renton577]

So I plan on building a new computer here soon, and am trying to decide for a CPU on my build, it's between the i3 7100 or the i5 7500, I have a GTX 1050 Ti right now so I'll be gaming at 1080P and don't plan on upgrading for a couple generations, will the i3's 2 cores and 4 threads really be enough for this card or should I go for the i5?

[Daniel1]

Personally I had an i3 like 4 years ago.  I don't prefer gaming on a i3 but if you can save up for an i5 you should be fine.  

[Spec2jeti]

It depends on the game. Of course it's not going to handle the newest Triple A titles. But it could handle CS:GO or Minecraft. Probably League too. The i7-7700K could barely handle some medium graphics demanding game. Hardly pushing 25 FPS. So if your playing low graphics demanding games, that's fine. But definitely use your 1050 ti. That'll do great for gaming. 

[Renton577]

Well right now I'm using a Core2Quad Q6600 because my last gaming computer kinda died so with that I'm playing overwatch a lot and the CPU bottleneck is real, I get 60fps like 40% of the time but otherwise the frame rate can be all over the place, and I'll be playing new games on PC like overwatch, Battlefield, etc, so I should probably do the i5?

[stconquest]

8 minutes ago, Renton577 said:

Well right now I'm using a Core2Quad Q6600 because my last gaming computer kinda died so with that I'm playing overwatch a lot and the CPU bottleneck is real, I get 60fps like 40% of the time but otherwise the frame rate can be all over the place, and I'll be playing new games on PC like overwatch, Battlefield, etc, so I should probably do the i5?

Don't do the i3.  The Pentium G4560 (Kabylake) is $75 and has Hyper Threading.

[Renton577]

11 minutes ago, stconquest said:

Don't do the i3.  The Pentium G4560 (Kabylake) is $75 and has Hyper Threading.

Wow thanks for pointing that out, $40 more for an i3 for only around a 9% performance gain.

[Princess Luna]

12 minutes ago, Renton577 said:

Wow thanks for pointing that out, $40 more for an i3 for only around a 9% performance gain.

Yes get a nice b250 motherboard and a G4560, you will have enough CPU power for a couple of years and later you can buy en used i7 7700 for a big performance boost.

[Renton577]

9 minutes ago, Princess Cadence said:

Yes get a nice b250 motherboard and a G4560, you will have enough CPU power for a couple of years and later you can buy en used i7 7700 for a big performance boost.

Thanks for that I'll get the G4560 but I'm getting a Z270 mobo for upgradability later on and all of those PCIE Lanes/ OC Capability

[Princess Luna]

1 minute ago, Renton577 said:

Thanks for that I'll get the G4560 but I'm getting a Z270 mobo for upgradability later on and all of those PCIE Lanes/ OC Capability

As long as you go 7700k in the future that should be fine, just don't fall on the i5 7600k trap.

[stconquest]

29 minutes ago, Renton577 said:

Wow thanks for pointing that out, $40 more for an i3 for only around a 9% performance gain.

The money saved might get you a RX 470, or even a RX 480/GTX1060. 

[Renton577]

29 minutes ago, Princess Cadence said:

As long as you go 7700k in the future that should be fine, just don't fall on the i5 7600k trap.

Yeah my future upgrade would be an i7-7700K, then again I don't know if I should really do that since I plan on keeping this 1050 TI for a couple years, by then I'll probably just want to build a new system.

23 minutes ago, stconquest said:

The money saved might get you a RX 470, or even a RX 480/GTX1060. 

I've already decided to keep my 1050 Ti for the next couple years, I don't really PC game to often so it works well for what I need and it only draws 75 watts

[Princess Luna]

1 minute ago, Renton577 said:

Yeah my future upgrade would be an i7-7700K, then again I don't know if I should really do that since I plan on keeping this 1050 TI for a couple years, by then I'll probably just want to build a new system.

eh... I would personally go h110m and i3 6100... the whole point of the G4560 is having a motherboard for future Kaby Lake and Coffee Lake... if you plan on rebuilding new in the future like 2020 then i would pretty much cheap out the maximum possible here... and leave the whole overclocking higher end build to be made by then... with definitely a better GPU.

[Renton577]

3 minutes ago, Princess Cadence said:

eh... I would personally go h110m and i3 6100... the whole point of the G4560 is having a motherboard for future Kaby Lake and Coffee Lake... if you plan on rebuilding new in the future like 2020 then i would pretty much cheap out the maximum possible here... and leave the whole overclocking higher end build to be made by then... with definitely a better GPU.

Yeah you're right, I think I'll still go B250 and the G4560, one of the nice things about it is 2400 DDR4 and 4K hardware decoding on Kaby Lake since this will be a media center PC / Gaming. And anyway even with all of that I have it at $394 so that's not bad.