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Is the 4th Gen Intel Core i3 Underrated

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It's a good CPU, but a Haswell dual-core Pentium is only ONE THIRD of the price of the i3 with 80-90% of the same performance.

If you don't need 4 cores, save the money and get the $40-50 processor - otherwise, the extra $25-50 to an i5 gets you a BIG step up in performance.

If you happen to have a Haswell 1150 i3, rest assured it's still a very good chip!
 
i3 Haswells are extremely good considering they are only dual cores. I like how they outperform an OCed FX 8350 (which is clocked at almost 5GHz) in pretty much every single benchmark.

But as far as gaming performance goes, a sandy bridge i5 2500k is going to be a lot faster, even at stock clock speed. Which makes it a much better buy if you can find one used for ~$150. I've seen NIB 3570k go for $160-170 on these forums regularly, so $150 for a 2500k should not be an issue.

I still think i3s are overpriced. The fact is that a Pentium or even a Celeron offers way more performance/$.
 
I usually go for the i3 when I don't need a high end chip because it is the cheapest chip that qualifies for Microcenter motherboard bundles, and it has pretty good onboard graphics.
 
Blue_Max said:
It's a good CPU, but a Haswell dual-core Pentium is only ONE THIRD of the price of the i3 with 80-90% of the same performance.

If you don't need 4 cores, save the money and get the $40-50 processor - otherwise, the extra $25-50 to an i5 gets you a BIG step up in performance.

If you happen to have a Haswell 1150 i3, rest assured it's still a very good chip!
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If we choose the most expensive i3-4340 and pit it against the cheapest Pentium, we don't quite get to the magic 1/3 that you tout, it's more like 44%, $160 vs $70, respectively. In that rather lopsided case, the low end Pentium provides about 63% of the performance of the i3 in fully threaded loads.

The surprising thing is that we see that i3-4340 nipping at the heels of its big quad-core brother:

http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core-i5-4430-vs-Intel-Core-i3-4340

It's not as cut and dried as the conventional "quad core rulez" wisdom would make it out to be, at least not with the current iteration...
 
If the Pentium G3220 will give 80% of the core i3 4130 does that mean i could use it for BF4 at medium settings in a multiplayer 64 man map.
 
ascalice said:
I didnt use an SDD. I used a 500GB Seagate 7200 RPM.
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yea but why ???
use both - cheap ssd for os - games-programs, use out of date hd for data and backups.


I recently built a few PCs. so whats the back story on this ? not like most people who build low budget pc's ,you then clone them and then what pile them in the closet ?
 
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ascalice said:
I read many articles saying that the core i3 sucks, spend the extra on an i5. However, I recently built a few PCs. All the PCs had 4GBRAM,500GB HDD, GeForce650, and one had an i3 and another had the i5. There really was no speed change. On startup, the i5 beat the i3 by 2-3 seconds. On basic web surfing, the core i5's performance was only 4-5% speed increase. In Minecraft, the core i5 ran at 45 frames while the i3 ran at 38.
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Lol both running off hdd ? Da fuq? Both would be slow!
 
I just knew someone was going to get anal over my math. 😉

There's $40 CELERON (not Pentium - SO sorry) chips that are, correctly, 1/3 the price of the cheapest $120 i3.
 
crashtech said:
The latest Haswell i3s work really well. Whatever tweaks the did to the µarch made HT work even better. An i3 with Turbo would likely embarrass low-end i5s. Even so, I wish they could figure out a way to place a Turbo or "K" i3 into their product lineup, that would be a killer little CPU.
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Haswell added more execution ports and another ALU- it can be tricky for a single thread to extract enough ILP to make the most of this wider core, but with Hyperthreading it can really shine. I'm excited to see how the Haswell core does in workstation CPUs, which will eat all the threads they can get.

EDIT: I really wish that Intel would bring out an LGA Broadwell or Haswell with two hyperthreaded cores and the GT3 graphics (maybe even GT3e). It would make a really nice "console" chip to counter Kaveri's performance at a lower power consumption.
 
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Blue_Max said:
I just knew someone was going to get anal over my math. 😉

There's $40 CELERON (not Pentium - SO sorry) chips that are, correctly, 1/3 the price of the cheapest $120 i3.
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Hey, I'm not trying to pick on you, and in many instances the i3 is NOT an appropriate choice. But nobody should be against accuracy. I've been called out on my hyperbole before, and rightly so.

So the cheapest Celerons are going for $60 commonly, and no less than $50 if you look hard right now. I think that will settle down, though. The 4130 is commonly $125, but can be found for $115. Once prices settle down your point will be true, but it isn't yet. And performance-wise, the low-end Celeron gives about 60% of the performance of the i3, which is to say it is cost effective, but maybe not quite enough of an upgrade for some, since its performance is somewhere in the range of a Nehalem i3.
 
crashtech said:
So the cheapest Celerons are going for $60 commonly, and no less than $50 if you look hard right now. I think that will settle down, though.
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😵

Maybe the new Haswell celerons are... They recently got released so retailers/etailers are trying their best to squeeze every $ they can out of them.

I got an Ivy G1620 for $34.99 at MC last month. Similar chips usually go for ~$40 on Amazon.

I could not be happier with the chip's performance/$ for my office rig :wub:
 
nwo said:
😵

Maybe the new Haswell celerons are... They recently got released so retailers/etailers are trying their best to squeeze every $ they can out of them.

I got an Ivy G1620 for $34.99 at MC last month. Similar chips usually go for ~$40 on Amazon.

I could not be happier with the chip's performance/$ for my office rig :wub:
Click to expand...

Yeah, I thought it was a given that we were talking about same generations here. If we want to compare the performance of the Ivy G1620 against the Haswell i3-4130, then the ratio falls to about 55%, but the price/performance is much more attractive.
 
I had a G1610 with 4GB RAM once. 1080p youtube vids in Chrome spiked to 100% CPU usage, 3 or 4 programs open and I could feel the sluggishness. And this was with an SSD. CPU + MOBO + RAM was like $120 so I'll let it slide, but I wouldn't use such a system daily. Cheap for a reason and all that.
 
I'm thinking even a C2D E8400 system could provide performance very similar to an IB or earlier Celeron, and the Haswell Celerons have proven to be not much better, unfortunately.
 
rgallant said:
yea but why ???
use both - cheap ssd for os - games-programs, use out of date hd for data and backups.


I recently built a few PCs. so whats the back story on this ? not like most people who build low budget pc's ,you then clone them and then what pile them in the closet ?
Click to expand...

I was only testing...they werent pernament PC builds and Im not speding extra money on a PC Im gonna disassemble. 2($100)=$200
 
Mfusick said:
Lol both running off hdd ? Da fuq? Both would be slow!
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Like I said, they werent pernament. They were just tests that I ran to see if the proccessors were the same or nearly. I am going to disassemble the PC after I go through some more testing.
 
I should have my hands on a i3 4330 tomorrow. Hopefully I'll be able to do some real world testing to see how it feels, browsing wise, application wise, and gaming wise.
 
crashtech said:
A 4130 should be faster than a non-OCed 750, even in most multithreaded loads.

http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core-i5-750-vs-Intel-Core-i3-4130
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Yes definitely stock v stock I'd hazard that the i3 should win many benches. I've noticed something over the years though, and that is practical use performance.

I remember back in the day there was a fairly poorly done, but at least admirable attempt at a 'real-world' test. IOW, test from the moment POST is cleared with the same HDD/Ram/etc, into various functions. Boot to a typical Windows desktop, then open a half dozen apps, and then open files in those apps/etc (open a half dozen tabs in FF/Chrome).

With the Lynnwood being a 4C/4T @ 2.66Ghz, and the i3 being a 3.4Ghz 2C/4T with higher IPC, the i3 should still win single-core even with an overclocked 750/760. However, some things just work better with quads when in a real-world situation, due to Windows scheduling. They don't even have to be things one would normally associate as being highly threaded, because they're not. It's just that with double the cores, Windows does a fairly decent job of balancing things out. More is better as they say 🙂

Would I recommend someone build an i5 750/760 TODAY? Almost certainly not, unless the price was very very low for used stuff. The difference between an OC'd 750/760 and 4130 isn't all that huge either way (most users couldn't tell the difference in a blind test I would bet), BUT the platform upgrades for the *8X chipsets are really gigantic compared to the *5X chipsets. Really good USB3.0, PCIe 3.0, Sata 6Gbps, etc. I've upgraded people's similar systems (i7-920 is a common one) to bring them a bit more up to date with PCIe USB3 and Sata6Gps cards, but nothing is ever quite as good as Intel chipset native stuff. Interestingly, AMD chipsets just plain aren't as good with that stuff either (USB/SATA). I'll admit I haven't used the newest FM2 chipsets though, but I hated my 990 boards, even the Sabertooth. I've never felt so ripped off.

In my personal experience, I've installed a couple dozen i3s for work systems, and well, they work. I can't say I like them very much, none of them feel as fast as I think they should, even with SSDs. I've ran across some mobile i5s like that too. Just systems that are sluggish when you know they shouldn't be (full fresh reload, ssd, tons of ram, no crapware, etc). They bench fast but just feel bleh. For that reason I've gone almost exclusively with i5s, i7s, and Samsung SSDs for the past year for my clients, and people are much much happier.
 
ehume said:
i5 and i7 quads?

(Edit: the mobile i5's and i7's are sometimes 2-core.)
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Yes, I avoid the dual-core i5s/i7s like the plague. They're such a scam. 2Ghz and below dual cores sold under the deceptive branding of the i5/i7. And a desktop i5 would absolutely demolish/destroy/annihilate a mobile i7U. 🙂

Hell, the i7-Us are slower than desktop I3!
 
some i7s are dual core with base clock under 2GHz like the 4500U and I've seen these things on regular sized laptops... :whiste:

"i7 is the best right?"
 
As best I can tell, they differ from i3's by the size of their caches. I suspect they are failed quad-cores . . .
 
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