best CPU under $160 / £150

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MA2K

Commendable
Sep 8, 2016
49
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1,540
mainly going to be used for gaming and browsing with a tonne of tabs (20+) and some light editing. need the CPU to be either skylake, kaby lake or ryzen. (no pentiums as i already have one) i dont want to overclock either. thanks in advance.
 
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Without knowing what your current build is, all we can do is make suggestions on current generaiton parts.

Your budget is just a hair short from being able to afford an i5 (going for 170-180 GBP right now).

SO for that budget that leaves i3 and bellow and there is really no point in buying an i3 for marginal gains over the pentium g4560 so for CPUs that are currently out right now today that is my suggestion.

If you can wait off another week can see what Ryzen 5 has to offer performance wise.
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evan1715

evan1715

Distinguished
May 26, 2011
188
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18,710
first of all, if you can pay a little extra, i would recommend getting the 4 core i5-7400 kaby lake, especially if you are going to use it for gaming, even light gaming.

secondly, if you must stay below that threshold, then the modern i3 and pentiums are nearly identical except for clock speed. for kaby lake, both the pentium and i3 series have dual core and 4 threads. check here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaby_Lake#Desktop_processors

therefore, i would say it is pointless to purchase an i3 and just shoot for a kaby lake pentium. if i were you, i would choose between the Pentium G4560 at $65 or the i5-7400 at $190.


edit: links: G4560 & i5-7400
 
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Barty1884

Barty1884

Retired Moderator
Apr 16, 2015
22,250
1,350
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Your existing CPU/setup will give us a better idea - if you're still on a Haswell platform (for example), then an i7-4770/K might be the 'best' CPU in budget.

Comparing pre-Skylake/Kabylake Pentiums vs something like a G4560 is not really fair. Pentiums have come quite a way.

That being said, I'm not sure how you're factoring a budget for just the CPU?
Either way, you're looking at a new motherboard too*.... and potentially RAM, so I'd recommend a budget for CPU+Mobo+RAM and go from there.

*Unless you're on Skylake currently, in which case I wouldn't recommend less than an i5..... but you'll consider Ryzen too, so that would necessitate a new board.....
 
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nyannyan

Reputable
Jul 11, 2016
24
1
4,520
Pentium with HT wouldn't be a bad cheap choice, but for lots of tabs the CPU is less important than the browser and memory. 20+ is nothing, but even at that load you may want to ditch Firefox and basically anything that does its own memory management. FF gets *really* slow when the memory footprint approaches 3GB, because the stock version is still 32-bit and can't handle more memory, and the 64-bit versions of the same codebase aren't much better. Switch to Chrome or something else that launches a thread for each tab. (FWIW, I have currently 120+ tabs open and I see no slowing down. FF choked at less than 40.)

Honestly tho, I might shop around for quadcore Skylakes. Kaby Lake gives little to no benefit in performance.
 
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boosted1g

Titan
Jun 12, 2013
14,846
8
74,965
Without knowing what your current build is, all we can do is make suggestions on current generaiton parts.

Your budget is just a hair short from being able to afford an i5 (going for 170-180 GBP right now).

SO for that budget that leaves i3 and bellow and there is really no point in buying an i3 for marginal gains over the pentium g4560 so for CPUs that are currently out right now today that is my suggestion.

If you can wait off another week can see what Ryzen 5 has to offer performance wise.
 
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