i3-6100?

[UhhhThatGuy]

Girlfriend wants a basic gaming rig.

I asked her, AMD or Intel, she chose Intel.

 

I want to give her a good upgrade path while still staying efficient with her budget and, so I chose the i3-6100.

 

As far as I know, you can use the same motherboard for 6th (Skylake) and 7th (KabyLake) gen, as long as the bios is up-to-date right?

 

If so then she's getting a very basic build with some decent upgrading in the future. She only wants to play Minecraft.

 

i3-6100 good then?

[mail929]

You are correct. I wouldn't say a 7th gen board is a great upgrade path as the newest CPUs it supports are already obsolete but it does provide some headroom on the budget I suppose.

[Herman Mcpootis]

no, a 2200G with dual channel ram would be much better while having a better upgrade path.

[UhhhThatGuy]

I should point out, she IS getting a dedicated GPU. A 1050ti.

[Herman Mcpootis]

12 minutes ago, UhhhThatGuy said:

I should point out, she IS getting a dedicated GPU. A 1050ti.

even in that case, a ryzen 3 or even an i3 8100 would be much better.

[Crunchy Dragon]

17 minutes ago, UhhhThatGuy said:

I want to give her a good upgrade path while still staying efficient with her budget and, so I chose the i3-6100.

 

As far as I know, you can use the same motherboard for 6th (Skylake) and 7th (KabyLake) gen, as long as the bios is up-to-date right?

 

If so then she's getting a very basic build with some decent upgrading in the future. She only wants to play Minecraft.

 

i3-6100 good then?

While it is possible for Skylake and Kaby Lake CPUs to share boards, the former isn't really worth it unless you're on a tighter budget.

 

And if I'm honest, if your girlfriend is only planning on running Vanilla Minecraft(no mods) and not tinkering with a bunch of redstone projects in one place, a quad core CPU would make more sense.

 

And the 1050Ti is a pretty overpowered card for vanilla Minecraft, so am I correct in assuming she wants Shaders as well? If so, you'll definitely want a more powerful CPU.

[aisle9]

14 minutes ago, UhhhThatGuy said:

I should point out, she IS getting a dedicated GPU. A 1050ti.

A Ryzen 3 1200 or Ryzen 5 1400 would make much more sense then. You can get a solid overclock on just the stock cooler, and you're getting four true cores as opposed to two. A B350 mobo can be found on the cheap, and you don't need spectacular VRMs for a 1200 or 1400. The AsRock Pro4 would be perfect.

 

If you're definitely going Intel, an i5-6500 would be a much better purchase.