Sign in with
Sign up | Sign in

Best Gaming CPU: Entry-level

Best Gaming CPUs For The Money: January 2013
By

Best Gaming CPU for £60:

Athlon II X4 640

Athlon II X4 640
Codename: Propus
Process: 45 nm
CPU Cores/Threads: 4
Clock Speed (Max. Turbo): 3.0 GHz
Socket: AM3/AM3+
L1 Cache: 4 x 128 KB
L2 Cache: 4 x 512 KB
Thermal Envelope:
95 W

With modern games able to take advantage of more than two processing cores, AMD's old quad-core chips, such as the Athlon II X4 and Llano-based A6 and A8 APUs, look better now compared to Intel's dual-core models than they did before.

As a result, we're cutting the Pentium G860 from our recommendation list. The Athlon II X4 640 takes its place. Running at 3 GHz, this CPU performs roughly on par with the A8-3870K for less money. Use the savings on a discrete graphics card.

Read our review of the Athlon II X4 CPUs here.

Best Gaming CPU for £75:

Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition

Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition
Codename: Deneb
Process: 45 nm
CPU Cores/Threads: 4
Clock Speed (Max. Turbo): 3.4 GHz
Socket: AM3/AM3+
L1 Cache: 4 x 128 KB
L2 Cache: 4 x 512 KB
L3 Cache:
6 MB
Thermal Envelope:
125 W

In the gaming CPU round-up that we recently finished testing for, but haven't yet published, the Phenom II X4 makes a significant comeback compared to its competition, since many of the newer games we tested are able to utilize multiple threads.

Sporting 6 MB of L3 cache and an unlocked ratio multiplier, AMD's Phenom II X4 965 is a solid performer at its stock clock rates, and it has some room to scale up with overclocking, too. Thanks to the long life of AMD's Socket AM3/AM3+ interface, you can buy this chip today and then upgrade to an FX model down the road (though we don't really see much reason to do so now, based on the FX's gaming performance). 

Read our review of the Phenom II X4 965 CPU here.

Ask a Category Expert

Create a new thread in the UK Article comments forum about this subject

Example: Notebook, Android, SSD hard drive

Display all 5 comments.
This thread is closed for comments
  • 0 Hide
    MajinCry , 18 January 2013 23:17
    FINALLY! The 965 is on the list!
  • 0 Hide
    Anonymous , 24 January 2013 16:07
    Hm. Looking at other sites, and their benchmarks, FX-6300 seems to be pretty nice, reaching i5 in several tests, at a bit over half the price.
  • 0 Hide
    redh4t , 24 January 2013 17:48
    It depends on what graphic card u are. FX6300 bottlenecks some high-end AMD cards like 7950~7970. I would recommend go with nVidia card + 6300, because nVidia cards are less CPU related.
  • 0 Hide
    jonboy79 , 27 January 2013 17:24
    Ive been doing some research and the fx6300 will keep up just with a i5 once been overclocked, and will totaly smoke a i3, but just £10 more than the i3, was the under £90 number made up so you didnt have to mention it.
  • 0 Hide
    jaguarcd32x , 1 February 2013 04:55
    Yes the reason why Nvidia Kepler GPU's don't get bottlenecked by a slower budget CPUis because Kepler cards can fetch textures straight from RAM. Other GPU's have to wait on the CPU marking textures for use before fetching them. There for if you have a budget or slow CPU and are only upgrading your GPU, then Nvidia Kepler will give you better performance.

    This is also one of the reasons why 680 matches 7970 despite having less VRAM. It also has better memory controllers.