Pentium G2120 vs i3 3220?

[chrisweasel81]

So, I do a lot of gaming on my pc, and I was wondering if they would both be good for it? I am coming from AMD and I understand the upgrade paths and how they work, and I am new to intel. I will get one of these cpus and upgrade when I have more money this spring. I play Skyrim, Mass Effect 3 and Battlefield 3, and some others. Would these be adequate to play these games? I have an HD 6950 as well...

 

[johnsonjohnson]

Hi. Yes both of them are good gaming processors. Since the price difference between the two isn't that great, I think you should be looking at G860 or i3-3220 instead. And since you are going to upgrade in the future, I'd go with the G860 and save the money for the upgrade. Or you can just to wait for Haswell.

 

[chrisweasel81]

Ok, will the G860 work well in a Z77 chipset?

 

[johnsonjohnson]

Yes it will.

Edit: I forgot to remind you to get the Z77 motherboard for the upgrade but you already know that.

 

[chrisweasel81]

Have a good mobo recommendation? I have very little knowledge about intel products

 

[johnsonjohnson]

I also forgot to ask which processor do you currently have?

 

[chrisweasel81]

Phenom II x4, motherboard and cpu have crashed on me though

 

[johnsonjohnson]

The ASRock Z77 Extreme4, ASUS P8Z77-V LK and GIGABYTE GA-Z77X-UD3H are good boards for starter.

 

[chrisweasel81]

I was looking at the amd fx-6300, and a lot of the benchmarks I have found have been all over the place, but do you know how it performs against lower end intels?

 

[johnsonjohnson]

From the CPU benchmarks I see the i3 and Pentiums are able to match or beat most if not all of the AMD processors since most games don't take advantage of more than two cores. But games like Battlefield 3 multiplayer will benefit from a quad-core.

 

[chrisweasel81]

Ok, thanks for the answers

 

[johnsonjohnson]

You're welcome.