New AMD stuff in budget categories is also on the way, so check back for those reviews! Our GN Tear-Down Toolkits now have a 7-year (retroactive!) warranty! This is a great way to support our work, our reviews and purchasing of components, and get something useful in return! store.gamersnexus.net/products/gamersnexus-tear-down-toolkit Coasters are also IN STOCK & SHIPPING: store.gamersnexus.net/products/3d-coaster-pack-4-component-coasters Watch our benchmarks and review of the Intel Celeron G6900: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/hZulm7pnmMmYmmw.html And our review of the Intel i3-12100F here: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/rqh0eaagrM6-ZJs.html Learn about AMD's new CPUs here: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/nMuodJp_ltjVYqM.html

I'm so glad there's some low end options that aren't COMPLETE gutter trash again, though the 12100 is probably still the metric to beat

I genuinely still can't believe I got the 1600AF at $85, it's been serving me well for my first build the past 2 years and I can still upgrade to a 5000 series chip later on with pretty much no issues.

It's a real shame Pentiums haven't moved to 4C/4T. It's just not worth the saving to downgrade from an i3, which is obviously substantially more powerful.

As a shop owner, I love seeing budget CPU competition. I get a lot of customers that want to game but just don't have the money to spend on something "decent". When you're poor, you're left in the dust when it comes to PC gaming (and everything else), so this chip is great news. Thanks for the review!

This will do great in office PCs. For gamers though, the i3 12100 is probably the minimum that should be considered.

The Pentium G4560 was only ever celebrated as much as it was because it featured the same 2C/4T configuration as the i3's of that generation (including the unbelievably stupid Core i3 7350K for triple the price). When the i3's have double the cores, threads, and cache for $20-$40 more, the Pentiums suddenly look stupid.

I really appreciate this channel's coverage of lower-end/budget-constrained parts, and the frankness of their limitations.

It would be interesting to include older high end CPUs such as the FX-8350 or 2700K just to see if these newer low ends can beat the older high ends. But the 2700X will have to do 😁👍🏻

Just bought an i3-10105F for $68 from Microcenter. These Celeron and Pentiums are barely competitive considering price alone, but with fewer cores and lower clocks fails the test

It's amazing how just 2 threads make the Celeron and Pentium perform so differently, literally everything uses at least 4 threads now

there's this interesting looking cpu cooler called alseye m90. appreciate it if you guys could review it and compare it to the other coolers you have tested until now. great job on the video as always

I love this channel, it's one of the few important pc ones that look at these budget options with the right mindset, let alone review them. Thanks steve and the rest of the team, especially where I live, even an i3 is expensive (south america)

The G7400 is just powerful enough to update the BIOS to install a faster CPU

It seems like the bigger issue at play here are the 12th gen Intel motherboard prices. Sure you can get an okay performing CPU for $86 but good luck finding a motherboard to use a 12th gen Intel part that isn't complete trash for less than $100, and it needs to be DDR4 to make sense.

Interesting to see the benefit w/ games 2c/4t gives vs 2c/2t. However, if you're building a PC and can't afford an i3 vs the G7400 then I'm sure you also cannot afford a GPU that's good enough to push either of those CPUs unless you're migrating an existing card to a new build.

Would be interesting to see these lower chips compared to 'previous' higher-end, like the i5/7 7x00/8x00 series etc, if people on 'older' tech are considering a cheaper upgrade, then improve later ;)

Fascinating seeing almost perfect scaling between the Pentium and the Core i3. This more than anything else should illustrate how games are now expecting at least 6 threads, if not the 8 of the i3.

Love low-end gaming. Takes me back to _trying_ to game on a prebuilt with an A10-6700 and a GT210 from like 2011...

2 core processors are incredibly limited and when most people will eventually want the extra headroom a 4 core would offer. Multitasking and gaming require more cores to swap applications or even just reduce bottlenecking. The 10100f is currently no more than 100$ and I wish you guys would have put it in the comparison chart but the 12100f is around 110$ so 20$ more for a massive performance increase is much more worth it. The notion that this would help save money should not be pushed so much given that in the past these pentium processors and even the athlon processors were 50-60$ and motherboards were less than 75$. The 12th gen cheapest H board is 110$ and the cheapest 10th gen board is 90$ while amd's got the A520 for 75$. Maybe amd or intel should be pushing to make cheap 4 core processors rather than cutting down to 2 but honestly if I were a ryzen 1200 owner or a 10100F owner I would be golden compared to this G7400.

im really getting into watching your videos since christmas last year keep up the great work steve

Steve! Can you take a look at the Antec NX700 mid tower case? I got one recently for a build for my brother and its.. very bad and it freaking started smoking, burning the fan cable. Needless to say.. it would be an interesting video 👀

Would be nice to include some transcoding benchmarks in these reviews, because of Intel's amazing iGPU. This one would be perfect (on paper) for something like a cheap Plex server, which should be able to transcode a couple of 4K streams easily (again, on paper). However, nobody has done the benchmarks IIRC.

I started online gaming in 1999 with Asheron's Call. I went from buying prebuilt rubbish to building my own gaming PCs. Fast forward to 2006...I went 100% to MacOS. I now use a M1 Max MBP and playing EVE Online, other MacOS games and games via Steam and GeForce Now. However, I always watch your KZfaq channel for component/system reviews.. Steve, your reviews are absolutely analytical, thorough and non-partisan. I do believe they are best available on KZfaq. While I doubt I'll ever leave MacOS...if I do, and return to building my own PCs...I know where to come for reviews and advice . Thank you Steve and your staff for all your brilliant work ! Cheers !

I wish the first performance graph were larger, the fact that the solid 2700x is at the bottom of this stack makes me wonder how this processor competes against 1st gen ryzen and older i5’s which I think it more realistically prices against.

the i3-10100f is going for around 79-82 usd and honestly i think its a really good value gaming cpu even compared to this

I can't help think that more useful charts would have been to compare the g7400 to old i5/i7 CPUs 3770/4770/7700 Ryzen 1400/1600/2600, the g7400 could be a good stop gap if you have to jump to a newer platform from one of the old CPUs & mobos... although I still think the 12100 should be the minimum bar...with the g7400 being ~£70 and the 12100 being ~£100.

I don't know what the prices are in the rest of the world, but the i3-10105f is 10 euros cheaper (here in the Netherlands) than the g7400 and is allround a beter cpu. Also, you can get a decent lga 1200 motherboards for a very good price. So if you are on a strict budget, i would go for the i3-10105 with a b560 mothboard.

I ended up buying a Pentium G7400, and it's great for what it's used for. A huge thing that this video glosses over is, the i3 it is compared with has no IGP. For gaming, yeah, not a big difference, although even then there are some where you suffer with a gimped CPU without the iGPU due to functionality on it that doesn't relate to rendering screens. So, the price difference between a "real" i3 and the Pentium is pretty significant, if you don't want to buy a discrete GPU. Again, gaming, it makes little difference, but when you're reviewing a product, and talking about non-gaming scenarios (which this did), it's probably a good idea to give prices for the non-castrated CPU, to make an apples to apples. The G7400 is extremely fast for most of what we do, and consumes very little power (something else that was left off). It's pretty much completely quiet. The Celeron probably is fine for basic stuff too, but probably can run into more trouble sooner, might not make much sense given the price difference was around $20. In short, it's a very nice CPU, and checks all the boxes if you use it for its intended purpose. Low power, low cost, comes with the GPU (which helps with decoding), and is extremely responsive. Just don't expect it to do higher end stuff that it wasn't intended for. For that, i3 or higher is definitely the way to go, and if you can't afford one, wait and save up.

So a serious question: why is 28 fps for 0.1% frequency lows considered unplayable, for example for Cyberpunk 2077? 28fps ain’t great, but it’s rare and as long as you’re sustaining 30fps+ 99.9% of the time, that seems pretty playable.

Thanks for the review, Steve. I always enjoy low end hardware reviews. Got to wonder what kind of performance a CPU with 8 efficiency cores would have provided (as these take the same space as two performance cores).

makes a nice change for a reviewer to talk sense at the budget end of the market, explaining clearly why. thank you and well done !!!

For the same price you can get a 10105F with box cooler and lga 1200 boards are way cheaper Or buy a b450 board and go for one of the new am4 budget cpus The pentium is just way to limited by the 2c/4t configuration

I have a ThermalTake The Tower 100, and I got it because of your reviews. I knew what I was getting into thanks to your coverage of the case's shortcomings and was able to plan my build to mitigate them. I wanted to use a big air cooler so I installed an SFX to ATX PSU adapter plate and filled the extra space below the PSU shroud with a 140mm intake fan, instead of installing the fan on top of it. I'm not sure how many cases gain a critical place to put your case fan by swapping in an SFX-L power supply, but this is one of them. ThermalTake made a lot of good, functional changes to this case since you called them out. Thanks

I'm surprised to see that Thermaltake case after so long

Would have liked to have seen this against the 10100f which is similarly priced right now. I can get a 10100f for £60 and they selling new still

Great review. Would be great to have some older intel cpus in the list to compare to, particularly for those wanting to upgrade, such as the i5-7500 or i5-4590.

We need Steve to build the ultimate flame bait-machine: Ryzen 5 5500 + Radeon 6500 XT = PCIe 3.0 x 4! I need my GN-Steve rants. Keep up the good work!

It's great to have a review of a budget-friendly component and upgrade advice

I appreciate the fact that you're trying to bring "budget" systems back, but I can't imagine anyone paying $90 for a cpu and $800+ for a gpu. If you want to make it realistic at least show a few gpus , maybe a higher tier and a entry level one also.

I feel like this is one of your best videos yet in terms of trying to help people make their own decisions and get the most out of their purchasing power when having to buy on a budget, especially when you get to the recap. Bravo.

I would completely take a 12100F and say $60 cheap case over a G7400 and a $100 case. The case isn't a functional upgrade (hell, velcro/zip-tie your parts into a $20 milk crate for tons of airflow and tie points!), especially at the heat loads/disks/fans you will have in an entry-level build. Best to invest in parts that show up in real performance.

Only changed my 3770K a year ago, and this is about on par. For a console gamer who is fine with 30+fps they can throw a 1660 or 1050Ti in there and get a good enough performance on low without spending too much.

nice to hear the name Pentium talked about seriously again.

can you try and do a BCLK OC of the G7400 and the 12100f like Der8auer has done, just to see, how far they can go, if people decide to push them to like 5-5.3 GHz?

Don't forget igpu is helpful for dgpu troubleshooting

This should really serve as a warning that AMD aren't the PC Gaming Master Race saviour that we all wanted them to be. The 12100 from Intel is an insane value and any of you guys who want to upgrade on a budget DO consider the 12100 as a valid option. I'm still on a 4790K about to upgrade and even on that absolute beast of a CPU the 12100 still destroys in just in gaming. We cannot discount the fact that the 12100 is a performance king espeically when you're doing 1440P or 4K. Especially you people like myself who are on a 4K monitor a 12100 will MORE THAN cover your requirements whereas the costs of a higher end GPU will more than likely be the limiting factor. All of you dudes and dudettes who are on higher resolution monitors purchase a 12100 and spend all the money you can on a higher end GPU. Love you all, keep gaming gamers 😎

That CPU is what you put in the computer you built so grandma can watch cat videos on YT.

This or the 12100 would probably pair well with an ARC A3, if those really launch at something like 150€ or with a pretty old GPU, once the market has fully settled (because you'll probably still be GPU limited in that case). The 12100 might be the better pick though, because the difference isn't much if you factor in the GPU, Mainboard, PSU, etc. cost.

Will this bottleneck my 3090 ti. I kind of blew my budget on the gpu.

one thing is, you can find the 10100f in the $80-$100 range just like the pentium

It has QSV, so probably an option for a cheap PLEX/JellyFin server

Since you were including non-gaming tasks I would have liked you to have included a 3990 or 3995WX, just for giggles. My most significant takeaway from your testing is that for gaming you really don't need anything better than a 12400. Just as there was a big jump from the Pentium to the 12100, so there was also a significant but lesser jump from the 12100 to the 12400 and increases beyond that were very small. In that vein I would have liked you to declutter the charts by first showing all the CPUs then showing only the Intel 12th gen CPUs, perhaps by fading out the others. Keep up the good work.

4 core 4 Threads like the ryzen 3 1200AF would have been a superb bump up for intel pentiums.

Glad to see Thermaltake made the needed changes to the Tower 100.

Got the medium mod mat from you guys and did my first build for my bro with it. Love the quality of it, will probably buy a toolkit as well.

The fact that there are brand new dual core cpus STILL being made for $100 is outrageous. Dual cores were cool....in 2006. This is getting ridiculous.

Nice, a review for the pentium gold. Thanks for that. It'll be nice to see a low budget build for gaming.

After finding my son kinda out grew his i5 6500 / gtx 1060 256gb NVME. Mainly due to recording gaming and uploading. I built up a semi used rig with a Ryzen 5 3600 / Founders 1070 and the new king of budget NVME 1TB SK Hynix Gold P31. Used Ryzen and AM4 really seems to be the way to go for PC gamers on a budget. Im thrilled to see Intel back in the CPU game for things. But high cost of DDR5 and Intel catching up by pushing TDP in anything beyond I3 has me waiting for whats to come another gen or 2 from Intel. Again happy to see em on the board. Just lets start making high end CPUs that consume less power than mid range GPUs. Super jacked to see what Intel puts out in gaming GPUs. The rumors are positive for sure.

I hope the semiconductor market becomes much more geographically diverse in the near future

pentiums remind me of a good time. Used to have a single core 3.2ghz pentium that ran all kinds of games back in the day. Only reason I upgraded was for mechwarrior online back in 2012 which was worth it, but I will always have a soft spot for the old pentium that carried me through the 2000's. Warcraft 3 frozen throne, guild wars, many flash games, CS source, AVA and combat arms. Man. Mine lived in a dell box that was under cooled and hot for most of the time used.

I'm glad to see yall cover stuff like this. I usually just see techyescity doing it

I like the idea of finding low budget cpus for low budget build but maybe this test would be a better comparison if you slapped it in a low budget build. I mean low budget builds at going to be around the 600-800 builds. you would be doing that with a 3080. So why not test it with something low budget gamers would actually be using.

It's nice to see some lower end parts tested, but it would be nice to see some more real life scenarios as well. I know it is the methodology of all the benchmarks, but you never see this ultra high/ultra low GPU/CPU in a system. I think it might be helpful to see how this lower end CPUs scale with lower end GPUs. I mean if you get something like RTX 3050, is there still the double fps increase if you upgrade from pentium to i3 like when using the RTX3080?

Shot in the dark but could you guys include Warzone in your benchmarks from time to time? It’s such an interesting game because it is SO CPU heavy it’s hard to tell what’s going on when it comes to upgrade decisions. You would just need to specify the game mode you are in (Royale Quads or Rebirth Quads)

A G3258 got me into PC gaming proper. Hope these low end parts can give people access to gaming and PC building like it did for me!

I just can't not start singing "It's all about the Pentiums, baby!" When I hear Steve talking about it.

Great video as always. Thanks for your honesty and all that you do for the community. I'd like to suggest if you are going to add the 2C/4T Intel part for benchmarks I would have loved to see the at least until now AMD competitor which would be the 3000g to see how it fares against it. Can't wait for the 4100 review!

I got an i3 12100f for EUR 106 a couple of days ago. Can't beat that price/performance!

With the GPU being the real cost of a build these days, absorbing the extra $20-30 or whatever to get an i3 seems like a no-brainer. I can't believe 2c CPUs are still being made

To be fair I think AMD’s supply issues were legitimate and cutting a 8 core down to 4 cores is not effective use of resources. I think going forward they have a legitimate case to actually make a quad core die, either monolithic or chip-let, for the low end market. They have enough volume sales to justify it now, where that wasn’t the case for earlier versions of Zen.

And here i am playing every game up to date with my RTX3060 that costed me 600€, paired with a X5650 OC to 4.5GHz, this CPU is from 2010, still amazes me in how easly it beats my 6600K at 4.5GHz and 7700K also

The i3 10100f is 81.00 at amazon 4 cores 8 threads thats the one i would get.

3:18 comeback of the 1600AF (only newer) would be nice...

I bought a Pentium G5400 (coffee lake) on the second hand market for about 25 euro. I paired it with 16GB ram and an RX 580 8G and tried some gaming, older/less demanding games mostly but it really wasn't too bad, i'd even go as far as calling it an enjoyable experience. Obviously, an older dual core, even with hyperthreading, won't handle many 2022 triple A titles, as expected, but for slightly older triple A titles and stuff like Overwatch, League of Legends, Valorant etc., it still does pretty well.

Pentium II MMX + GF2 on quake II and UT, those were the days the Pentium name was said strong.

To me; Price/Value wise 3600 looks like the real winner.

For these low-power CPUs, it would be useful to benchmark emulators for HTPC users.

I did spend the money for an I3 for my gaming PC. However I wish I had that pentium at work, it would make a world of difference compared to what we have right now.

Good advice. I did that a number of years back with the anniversary Pentium. It lasted me several years with okay gaming until I could upgrade to an i5

This is inhumane. You are a monster for doing this.

I wonder how well this would match with a gt1030 for a low powered box, given the games I'm interested in are 9800 gt era and 90s colsole emulation.

200 plus people comment and don’t even notice poor audio edits in video. Lmao. What a world.

This is so close to an i5-4670K it's crazy!

I misread the title and thought you were reviewing some ancient Pentium from the Bush era

Something I just thought of is maybe put a spot in the charts or at the end saying which gpu best matches the average fps in the tests, it’s be interesting to see what pairings would look like but also would be a lot of data to go through, just an idea

On advice on "jump on higher tier later" should consider the used market! With newer generations, higher-end CPUs are still valid, great performance and relatively cheap.

The only thing I'm going to use this CPU is to help people that bought the Z690 chipsets and lower to update their BIOS to support the newest Intel CPU's. Not all motherboards have the BIOS flash back option and honestly when the 13th gen launches, people will still pair those CPU's will what is currently launched(motherboards) and they'll need the BIOS update.

While I understand the reasoning of not going for one with an iGPU because any discrete one will be better. I really like the feature of having an iGPU. It was the difference for me personally between pulling the trigger in buying a GPU at an increased cost and sticking through it till RDNA3/Lovelace launches. The ability to set secondary programs like your browser or maybe a very low demand game you have on your other monitor to use your iGPU instead of your discrete one really helped me not have to pause a stream everytime I got into a match because it had a noticable difference on my FPS.(Obv doesnt apply if your cpu then just becomes the bottleneck). I remember a time I was playing Elite:Dangerous and my gpu at the time just could not open a browser and without a livestream, space is a very lonely place. I was lucky enough to have an old laptop from school that I could use for the browser and plug earbuds in under my headset. If I had known about forcing it onto my iGPU back then I would've been able to enjoy the game without the privelage of also owning a laptop or other device. I don't think I would've enjoyed the game without either of those options. So I suppose you'd have to evaluate to cost difference between the F and non-F SKU and see if adding that to your dGPU cost can give you the same performance. Which is like 20-30 euros? That plus the added feature of being able to troubleshoot if your gpu is borked or still having a use for the system if you transfer over your gpu always makes an F SKU a really hard buy for me.

I have 7 Pentium and 11 Celeron. It's worth the Pentium even in work stations. Celeron is really for browsing/emails/streaming at this point. Just an opinion from someone that has 20+ workstations. As stations are replaced they will be all Pentium class. The time saved, well, for everything you do on it, adds up. Great Review and ty for your work GN!

My i5 7400 is still going strong 💪😤🤙

When RandomGaminginHD reviews a processor before you :)

This CPU should be tested from a HTPC/Office pc computer perspective. Why those tests are not included is beyond me.

There's a bigger market than you might think with budget CPUs, considering the amount of companies that switch to cloud based computing but basically need a dumb terminal to access it. Obvs these are all usually bought from system configurators who aren't buying the CPUs at sticker price, but it's a market AMD has yet to break into with Ryzen

Nice testing but such a pity that the power consumption is missing, I dont think a lot of people are gonna buy this for a gaming CPU but more for a NAS/small server, and in that case it could have been very interesting to see the power consomption

B & H has the Pentium for $80 and the i3 for $110 currently, with the latter out of stock.

Me before the ad roll: OOOOhhhh.... Is this going to be another official "waste of sand"?!?!?! By the end: well, that's really not nearly as bad as expected. OK I guess.

I feel Intel needs to fill that 4c/4t billet. Call it Core i1 by all means.

I'm struck by how amazing the 12100 does, how much better the 3600 is than the 2700x, and by how well Zen 3 holds up with Alder Lake. Can't wait for Raptor Lake vs Zen 4. Oh...this is a Pentium video, meh I still watched it lol.

I would love if you would start reviewing CPUs and motherboard from DIY nas (unraid, truenas,etc.) point of view, not just gaming. Just a polite request 😃