Robert Rodriguez2 said:I figured putting a quad core in his build gave him a cheaper way to upgrade later. Anything on AM4 is going to be a dead end soon anyway.
I skipped Intel because upgrading later costs a fortune, and honestly, that i3 just feels off to me, regardless of the 2core + hyper threading.
I get where you're coming from, but the OP needs to clarify what they actually want regarding this question.
So:
-Are they planning an upgrade?
-Do they plan on overclocking?
First off, if there’s no overclocking involved, then AMD doesn't even have a seat at the table here. Better to put the cash into a new platform with a decent i3 rather than wasting money on an AMD chip that'll just run at stock—especially since you'd be paying extra for a cooler ($33 which isn't cheap in a build like this)
In my opinion, the i3 6098p beats those quad-core AMD chips at stock frequencies, hands down. I've looked at plenty of benchmarks for CPU-heavy games, and i3s usually match or beat quad/hexa AMD setups.
If you start overclocking, though, AMD can definitely bite back and outperform an i3 or even an i5 for the same or less money.
The idea of a weak AMD build being an "upgrade path" doesn't sit right with me. Sure, the price looks okay, but if they actually follow through on an upgrade, they'll end up selling their processor for pennies, having a leftover cooler they'll get next to nothing for, and then needing to buy a new one anyway (if they move up to a Ryzen 7 Liquid Cooled, it's not exactly some low-power rig).
An ASUS 500W PSU would work, but if they go Intel, they could probably get away with a cheaper power supply.
As a "no-upgrade" build, it's fine, but I'd honestly just go with a Ryzen.
If they want to OC, I'd go Ryzen.
If they want both OC and an upgrade path, go with a Ryzen.
If they only care about the upgrade path without overclocking, I'd go with Coffee Lake—either an i3 or a Celeron depending on how fast they want to upgrade and what they intend to play.
If they aren't doing OC or upgrading, personally, I'd stick with the i3 for the modern platform; even if it's just "meh," it still holds its own in most CPU-intensive games. Though a Ryzen would be fine too.
With any Intel build, you can use a lower-end power supply compared to what you'd eventually need for a Ryzen 7 platform.
That's my two cents. In these tight-budget situations where everyone is thinking about ten different things, the user really needs to state exactly what their goals are and what they're willing to do.
It's pointless to build an upgrade path if the person never intends to open the case, or to prep for overclocking if they aren't actually going to do it. And there's no point building for OC if you're just going to have to swap out half the parts later.
