Olle P :
adamrcharles :
... a Pentium/rx570 combo likely outperforms an i3/1050 combo in most situations for a slightly cheaper price.
I saw a recent review with new games showing that 2 (fast) cores with HT do become increasingly obsolete and less useful compared to 4 (not so fast) cores.
The Pentiums and prior-gen i3s don't seem worth it right now, at least going by current US online pricing. Intel seems to have cut back production of their less profitable processors due to their current production issues, so prices have risen and availability has become scarce, and many of their CPUs that had been decent values some months back are now priced out of the market. A $90+ dual-core is just not worth considering when AMD's quad-core 1200 and 2200G are available for under $100. The Ryzen 1300X also seems a bit pointless to consider, when the 2200G provides nearly identical performance (especially after overclocking), along with the best integrated graphics in its class, for $30 less.
And that would be the better comparison to make, pairing a faster graphics card with a 2200G. The $30 saved over the i3-8100 (or around $20 saved if we spend a bit more on faster RAM to get the most out of Ryzen) would go long way toward moving up from a GTX 1050 to an RX 570, offering roughly double the graphics performance. The small performance difference between the 8100 and an overclocked 2200G will rarely make any notable impact to frame rates with the cards these CPUs are likely to be paired with in the near future, but doubling graphics performance absolutely will. And for that matter, the 1050 Ti is also arguably overpriced considering the much faster RX 570 currently costs about the same. The 1050 Ti is an alright option for someone upgrading a prebuilt system with a 300 watt PSU, but anyone building a new system will likely be going with at least a 450 watt PSU, where the increased power draw of the RX 570 shouldn't really matter.
Also, I really don't like the way these price comparisons are done. At least in the case of this roundup, differences in platform costs aren't as much of a concern, since all these chips include boxed coolers and can run on inexpensive motherboards, but the prices still have major problems, since you simply can't buy most of Intel's processors at MSRP right now. Some of them aren't even close. What's the point of a price-focused roundup when the prices that it's based on are out-of-date and inaccurate? All these charts and recommendations should be updated to current real-world pricing.
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