Better Bang for Buck?

[redsquirrel0249]

I'm looking at an i3-8100 for a PC build for a friend looking for a machine to forum crawl and have lots of tabs open. It's in the $115 ballpark, but is there anything better? I've looked at the Ryzen 3 APU, but it seems too GPU heavy for someone who isn't going to be playing games, and the Pentium G4560 doesn't have the multicore power, despite its cost effectiveness.

 

Obviously, a functional CPU for $30 would be more "efficient," so keep it in the quad core realm. Thanks in advance.

[jiyeon]

8100 is honestly fine for an everyday machine, at least in my eyes.

[redsquirrel0249]

7 minutes ago, seoz said:

fine

If I was content with that, I wouldn't have made this post. I'm looking for comparisons, basically.

[jiyeon]

2 minutes ago, redsquirrel0249 said:

If I was content with that, I wouldn't have made this post

Okay, think about it this way, then:

 

8100: $115, 3.6GHz, 65W

8300: $138, 3.7GHz, 65W
8350K: $168, 4GHz, 91W

 

On paper, for a machine designed purely for everyday usage such as internet browsing, the 8100 is the best bang-for-buck processor here.

A reminder that i3s do not have turbo nor hyper-threading, so paying $13 more for a 0.1GHz clock doesn't make the most sense, right?

 

I would've suggested a Pentium for even more cost-saving measures, but to me, the bottom-of-the-barrel 8100 is the best value here, and you also mentioned you see the lack of power in Pentiums.

[redsquirrel0249]

50 minutes ago, seoz said:

lack of power in Pentiums

Well, just dual core ones. Though, I'm not familiar enough with the Pentium lineup to know.

 

And your chart of price and clock is nice, but I was looking for more comparable information. Clock speed doesn't necessarily indicate performance, and multi-threaded and single-threaded benchmark scores only show a synthetic part of a processor's utility.

 

Part of me wondered if bumping up to a Ryzen 5 2200G would be worth the price, despite the lean towards the IGPU. It's in between i5 processors and i3 processors, and comes with graphics.

 

The main reason I made this post was because I thought about how quickly processors become insufficient for their tasks. Pentiums of days past couldn't get today's office work done without stuttering and taking ages longer than they should. However, an older i5 or i7 can still do normal things just like a brand new processor (obviously not stressful applications, but you get the point).

 

Ultimately, I was pretty sure 8100 was the most efficient purchase for a DDR4 office system, but wanted extra opinions.