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i3-4130 vs Pentium G3258 for NON-gamer...any difference?

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October 9, 2014 3:01:05 PM

...I mean any NOTICEABLE difference in mundane everyday use?

By which I mean: heavy Chrome browsing, Office multit-tasking, light music/video entertainment (not editing).

This would go with an entry level $65 Gigabyte mobo, 8-16GB RAM, and an SSD as boot drive. Windows 7 home, possibly dual boot with Linux Mint.

It's about a $50 price difference...the main difference I can see is that the i3 has hyperthreading. Is that a feature that a casual non-gaming user like me even needs?

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October 9, 2014 3:05:54 PM

to be quite honest, for casual use: http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-G3258-vs-Intel-Core-i3-41...

the cheaper pentium might be the way to go... the i3 might last a little longer with the hyperthreading being available, but you should be fine with the cheaper option for the uses you list here. (put the 50 bucks towards a larger ssd or monitor)
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October 9, 2014 3:13:16 PM

For non gaming, i would grab an fx 6300, those 6 cores would come in handy and its cheaper than an i3.
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October 9, 2014 3:34:31 PM

vagrantsoul said:
to be quite honest, for casual use: http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-G3258-vs-Intel-Core-i3-41...

the cheaper pentium might be the way to go... the i3 might last a little longer with the hyperthreading being available, but you should be fine with the cheaper option for the uses you list here. (put the 50 bucks towards a larger ssd or monitor)


Thanks, that is an awesome website...bookmarked!

$50 would go nicely towards a second 8GB stick of RAM, for my 30-100 simultaneous Chrome tabs. :) 
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October 9, 2014 3:35:59 PM

LookItsRain said:
For non gaming, i would grab an fx 6300, those 6 cores would come in handy and its cheaper than an i3.


So having 6 cores would be innately better for multi-tasking and heavy browsing than 2? What about extra cooling needs, since I am often told that AMD runs hotter?
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October 9, 2014 3:57:44 PM

Would be nice to have Windows 8 on an SSD boot drive to enjoy that few second boot time feature
G3258 is great for simple office systems, i still build them for clients on tighter budgets but they usually have budget for a 4130 (£450gbp) to account for the future proofing factor and occasional heavy multitasking
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October 9, 2014 4:10:38 PM

Be careful with '*boss'. Their testing is rudimentary, and yet while somewhat accurate with their particular tests, is often misleading and usually not applicable with real life scenarios.

AMD and Intel architecture on cpus is totally different, so is not exactly easy to equate core for core. The fx6300 may have 6 cores, but the i3 has hyperthreading, in effect making it a virtual 4 core.
AMD may dominate floating point, but Intel dominates single thread applications. This means media apps run better/smoother on Intel. For multiple open windows, you'll need to bump up your ram. If you are set o reaching 100 Windows, you should be looking at 16Gb+

The only reason for the push on the pentium G3258's is its overclockability. Otherwise you'd be better off with the i3, unless you'd prefer a slightly stronger full 4 core i5 4440
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October 9, 2014 4:19:19 PM

chris_shadez said:
Would be nice to have Windows 8 on an SSD boot drive to enjoy that few second boot time feature
G3258 is great for simple office systems, i still build them for clients on tighter budgets but they usually have budget for a 4130 (£450gbp) to account for the future proofing factor and occasional heavy multitasking


But if most people leave their computers on or in sleep mode 98% of the time, how much difference can the W8 boot time really make?

Maybe I should go to Best Buy and play around with Windows 8.1 sometime ... though I notice that Dell has lately started to offer Win 7 again on more and more of its machines.
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October 9, 2014 4:25:41 PM

Zorba Greekthe said:
LookItsRain said:
For non gaming, i would grab an fx 6300, those 6 cores would come in handy and its cheaper than an i3.


So having 6 cores would be innately better for multi-tasking and heavy browsing than 2? What about extra cooling needs, since I am often told that AMD runs hotter?


The stock cooler will be sufficient since you wont need to overclock, the 6 cores would be much better than 2, since the since single core performance is not needed for desktop applications.

The only downside is that there is no real upgrade path like an 1150 system.
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October 9, 2014 4:59:29 PM

LookItsRain said:

The stock cooler will be sufficient since you wont need to overclock, the 6 cores would be much better than 2, since the since single core performance is not needed for desktop applications.

The only downside is that there is no real upgrade path like an 1150 system.


I am not sure if I would need an upgrade path...as long as the system can last me for say, 6 years of regular use that would be plenty...supposedly Win7 support will run out in 2020. By that time hopefully Microsoft would have come up with a decent OS again.

What I'm not clear with is how multiple cores are used...this is probably a dumb question but, does the CPU assign different apps to different cores, or does it use more than one core to run individual apps if they need it? For example, if I am running Chrome with 100 tabs open, would those tabs all be running off the same core? And one core would handle Word, one for Excel, one for a media player, etc.?
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October 9, 2014 5:24:41 PM

Zorba Greekthe said:
LookItsRain said:

The stock cooler will be sufficient since you wont need to overclock, the 6 cores would be much better than 2, since the since single core performance is not needed for desktop applications.

The only downside is that there is no real upgrade path like an 1150 system.


I am not sure if I would need an upgrade path...as long as the system can last me for say, 6 years of regular use that would be plenty...supposedly Win7 support will run out in 2020. By that time hopefully Microsoft would have come up with a decent OS again.

What I'm not clear with is how multiple cores are used...this is probably a dumb question but, does the CPU assign different apps to different cores, or does it use more than one core to run individual apps if they need it? For example, if I am running Chrome with 100 tabs open, would those tabs all be running off the same core? And one core would handle Word, one for Excel, one for a media player, etc.?


No, it does not work like that, a specific program does not get assigned a specific core, but in the case of having 100 tabs open, it will only tax your cpu when the are open, in which one core or more will handle the load, depending on the amount of tabs you open at once, having 100 tabs with 98 of them inactive will just axe murder your ram.
But having multiple programs open, say chrome, word, excel and then a video/photo editing program, on a 2 core processor your photo/video editing software would be much slower since the 2 cores have to run 4 programs despite each core being faster.

In general for a multi-threaded task, the fx 6300 will be around 20% faster and cost less than an i3 4130 at stock clock speeds. While the fx has the ability to overclock and the i3 does not.
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