Hot budget CPU Kaby Lake G4560 $80

[Boddy]

I was considering building a workstation with a cheap used E5-2640 ($25) but 2.5 GHz (3 GHX turbo) speed and the cost of non generic (Chinese) motherboard for $300 was a bit dissuasive.

The new G4560 Kaby Lake Pentium CPU can be bought for $80 new.
A budget CPU with 3.5 GHz dual core and Hyperthreading! Only 3 Mb cache and no AVX support.

Coupled with a new mATX motherboard for AU$125 (Asus B250M-Plus) (Newegg US$95) and 2 x 4 GB RAM AU$109)(Kingston Hyper X-FURY), it could make for a low power budget PC or workstation or even a Media Centre or other low power application. And it includes dual M.2 drive support.

There seems to be such a high demand for G4560 CPU (which I imagine is driven by owners of older platforms wanting to upgrade to current platform): that many large retail shops are out of stock of this CPU and do not expect to be restocked till mid-August.

I’d welcome others feedback on the viability of this budget platform.

I’m considering upgrading to a i3-7100 3.9 GHz, AVX 2.0 and Optane support for an extra AU$70 (AU$149) and Asus H270 Pro motherboard for an extra $44 (AU$169).

Do you think the upgrade is worth spending an extra U$114?

Many thanks in advance for your advice.

 

[gigatexal]

I’d go the 7100 as it gives you more features to play with.

 

[RTM]

Without doing the maths, it looks like your suggested upgrade is a significant price increase, based on that I would say that performance/value wise it is probably not a fantastic deal.

That said, cheap motherboards tends to be terrible quality wise, so upgrading MOBO may not be a bad idea (of course consumer grade hardware often is pretty shoddy anyway, so the upgrade may not even give you a significant quality increase).

By the way, what I am missing from this post, is a description of what you are going to use it for, "low power budget PC or workstation or even a Media Centre or other low power application" is not very accurate
Without that, it is quite difficult to estimate whether an update is worth it.

Offtopic:
This is probably not "great deals" worthy materials, as you are talking about buying new stock hardware retail.

Also did you copy your post from word or something else?
The fontsize is quite a bit larger than default on this forum (and it is honestly annoying to read, with the huge double line spaces)

 

[Boddy]

Thanks @RTM for your valuable feedback. (PSI have updated the font above.)

I plan to use it as a low power (2nd rig ) for surfing and doing less demanding stuff. You are correct that upgrade probably doesn't stack up price/performance wise, but the slightly faster CPU (about 12%) may give me an extra year before needing to upgrade & smart cache (if that is worth it?). Both MB are ASUS so quality should be reasonable for consumer grade hardware. The upgraded MB gives me more PCI slots and better placed DIMM slots to CPU cooler.

Probably not 'great deals' per se in the original scheme of the thread.
Though I did think $80 for a current budget CPU and they are selling like hot cakes, with reasonably priced MB & RAM could be an alternative consideration to higher priced older technology, but it does depend on your intended use and budget. Cheers

 

[msg7086]

4560 is well known to have a good pp-ratio. The missing AVX and cache is not that big deal for home use, and an extra year of usage may not be that big deal either.

Also you can take a look at Ryzen 3.

 

[Boddy]

Thanks @msg7086 for your valuable feedback. The Ryzen 3 1300X looks interesting, though an article in PC Gamer I read suggested MB (except Gigabyte) may still be buggy at this stage. May consider a GB motherboard. Thanks for the feedback!