G3258 with a Dedicated Graphics Card VS i5 4460 with Integrated Graphics

If I were you I'd get an i3 and a cheap GPU.

An R7 250X would outpace the iGPU on an i5, but the dual-core Pentium will be a lot poorer if you're not going to overclock.

An i3 isn't really too far off an i5 and has four logical cores for processing, so you'll get that a good chunk of that CPU punch you're looking for.

Get a Pentium and an R7 card and you'll only end up wanting to upgrade both before the year's out.

I recommended you to buy a H81 MoBo because they cost the least. But, if you can find an affordable H87 or H97 MoBo, you could buy that one instead. But, for a secondary PC with low performance expectations, I would just save the money.

Also about the i3, its in the middle, performance wise. Sure, it`s good for low budget gaming PC`s with a equivelant GPU like the GTX 760 or R9 280, but you are paying double the money for 0.4ghz and Hyper Threading. I would either get G3220 or i5 4460.

If you put it that way then you may as well say don't get an i5 because you're paying more than four times the money for 0.4 GHz and two extra cores. And what the OP wants is a low-budget gaming PC.

G3220 is £40. i3 4130 is £80 more than the G3220 for 400 MHz more, DDR3-1600 instead of -1333 but most importantly four logical cores compared to the two cores of the G3220. i5 4460 is £50 more again than the i3 for 0 MHz more when boosted, same memory bandwidth, but four full cores (each with their own cache and processor) rather than four logical.

If single-threaded applications are the only concern then there's no point getting an i3 over a G3220, but neither is there any point in getting an i5 over either of them. If multi-threaded applications are a concern, the i5 outperforms the i3 which outperforms the G3220, and the margin between the i3 and the G3220 is a lot bigger than that between the i5 and the i3.

So as a rule of thumb, if good multi-thread performance isn't a concern and budget is, the G3220 is fine. But if multi-threaded performance matters yet budget is still an issue, an i3 is a good buy. This isn't a main PC but a secondary PC that "may" get asked to play a game at minimum settings for which a Q8200 is the recommended, a 2GHz dual core the minimum. Sticking an i5 in that is expensive overkill for the CPU and its iGPU will only scrape the game's minimum requirements.



@OzuJL: If you think you're going to need multithreaded performance then get the cheapest i3-4xxx and the best GPU you can afford. If not then get the G3220 and a better GPU with the savings. Or, given the specs of some of your older games, you could even try the get the i3 alone and try its iGPU for size, upgrading to a better GPU later than you can afford now. In all honesty, for a secondary PC playing old games on a LAN that you don't want to spend too much money on, 200€ on an i5 I don't think you'll ever see the full benefit.

In fact, the more I think about it the more you'll probably be fine with the Pentium and best GPU you can get, provided you won't start demanding a lot more of it within the next year.

Get the faster cpu. Use the integrated graphics while you save for a high end gpu. You will be unsatisfied with the Pentium later on.