For general home use, will my wife tell the difference between an i3 and a pentium?

[ibex333]

I honestly think that your wife would be just fine with a much slower Pentium as well. For general use that is.

She would probably see no difference.

 

[TheELF]

I just don't want to go to all the hassle of reinstalling all the programs that were on the XP box. Most of them can run under Win 10 but it is a long job to reinstall and then get all the quirky options set so it looks and works like I want. Eventually, it will get replaced, just not now.

[offtopic]
You do know that XP mode was made for this reason,do you?
Clone your xp hdd into a file boot up into xp mode and keep using it like nothing changed just with much better hardware.
[/offtopic]

G4560 and above will be plenty for anything,you'll need a dgpu for sims4 anyway if you connect it to a fhd screen.
Browser tabs page content to the ram because it's faster then the pagefile so browsers will use a lot of ram if it's available but it won't be that much slower with less ram.

 

[ao_ika_red]

Seriously, if you do end up going with a G4560, consider a G4600 with HD 630 rather than HD 610, and an ASRock DeskMini mini-STX PC. (Though, I've been having intermittent reliability problems with one of mine, that has an Adata SX8000 PCI-E M.2 SSD.)

I absolutely agree with G4600. It's more expensive than G4560, but still more affordable than an i3. If you don't want any dGPU, HD 630 in G4600 will do quite good job in simulation games and also support almost all latest codecs that will absolutely help in Youtube, NetFlix, etc.

 

[cfenton]

This is just a basic gmail, tons of youtube for the kids, some word and excel docs machine.
.

If that's all it's for, then I doubt you'd notice a difference between a pentium and an i3. Though, you might not notice much of an upgrade from what you have now, depending on the processor you have. Just about any desktop CPU from the last 5-7 years will do all of those things just fine, as long as they are paired with an SSD. I bet the biggest difference would be hardware h.264 decoding for Youtube, which would cut down on your CPU load.

 

[piasabird]

On my last build that my wife is currently using with a 32 inch HDTV, I found a deal on a Mini-ITX H110 Intel Chip set motherboard, and an Intel 6100 I-3. Micro Center was running a deal on the combo and giving $30 off on the motherboard. A deal like this might be nice for an economical non-gaming system. The H110 chipset was a kind of economical low-end product with fewer possible connections like SATA and USB3. However, I found I did not use many things I needed to plug in. I put this in a smallish cube case.

Thermaltake Core V1:
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?item=N82E16811133260

This deal was about a year ago or so. Still looking at Micro Center deals might be a good idea.