The Pentium G850 is good enough for most gaming, right?

[micrometers]

You save like $40-$50 vs an i3 which is significant. you put that money towards a better video card, like say a Geforce GT 560.

You don't get 100 FPS (CPU limited) but can get like 60 which is good enough.

side note, but it would be cool if there were a distro of linux that were devoted solely to games. $100 for Windows 7 is just too much.

 

[Homeles]

Sandy Bridge Pentiums and Celerons are Intel's gift to mankind.

 

[lyssword]

g850 and i3 2100 are actually almost identical in gaming (if you look at cpu bench g850 and i3 are actually equal in gaming, nothing as radical as 60 vs 100, more like 95 vs 100fps). Only difference is hyperthreading, and most games don't care for that.
If you want to go ~10% slower at savings of $20 get g630 ($67 on newegg). But if you do want g850, forget about it as there is g860 now (3ghz) for $3 more on newegg.

 

[eternalone]

I have G850 and can verify you can game very nicely with it. I believe at stock it is faster than the core 2 duo 8500. Spend the money on a good video card. But be warned BF3 is a cpu whore and 2Gb Video Cards is recommended, since it can eat up to 1.5GB alone. Im running an old 4830 because im cheap and waiting to upgrade to the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 when it comes out. But even with my old card I can play BF3 on low settings on 15/32 with ok framrate (sometimes).



"It turns out that the budget-oriented Sandy Bridge-based Pentium family performs very well in games. Specifically, Intel's $70 Pentium G630 beat the FX-4100, -6100, and -8120 in our recent sub-$200 CPU gaming comparison."

So yes at stock it even beats the all of AMD's current offerings.

Source :

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-cpu-review-overclock,3106-2.html

 

[skipsneeky2]

Rather have a used gtx460 with a i3 2100 before i would buy a g850 and a gtx560,some games like BF3 run perfectly fine matched with a 6870/gtx560 but for a gaming pc,the i3 2100 is perfect starter chip.

Not always about framerate when it comes to chips,its also how taxed the chip will be and if it can deliver a smooth framerate or if it chokes.

 

[grimpr]

Rather have a used gtx460 with a i3 2100 before i would buy a g850 and a gtx560,some games like BF3 run perfectly fine matched with a 6870/gtx560 but for a gaming pc,the i3 2100 is perfect starter chip.

Not always about framerate when it comes to chips,its also how taxed the chip will be and if it can deliver a smooth framerate or if it chokes.

This, Hyperthreading really helps on a dualcore.

 

[YoursAV]

I think I3-2100 is better.

 

[Puppies04]

I will warn you, there is a thread in this forum specifically about the fact that dual core (non hyperthreaded) chips suffer from frame rate issues in BF3 multiplayer. Pretty much everything else should run fine but this game seems to require 4 thread+ to perform properly.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Unless you play BF3 multiplayer all day. I would pick the G850.