After my previous system burned out, I looked into building a budget-friendly microATX gaming PC. I considered going with a non-K i5, but after reading tons of reviews online and considering the fact that the 6100 was about $100 cheaper than the cheapest i5, I decided to choose the 6100. I am thoroughly impressed with its performance for such a good price. I had previously owned an i5-4690K OC'd to 4.1GHz with 8GB DDR3 memory. For considerably cheaper than my previous rig, I was able to snag the 6100, a microATX motherboard, and 16GB of DDR4. I also upgraded my SSD to a 256gb Samsung 850 EVO. My machine feels noticeably faster now. I am unsure of which part accounts for this, or if all of them working together is the culprit, but whatever the case may be it feels like greased lightning. I paired this with a Zotac GTX 1060 and have been getting 55-60FPS consistently at 1080p in The Witcher 3 with the CPU hitting a max of about 46C. I am also getting consistent 100FPS in Dwarf Fortress 2014 at a fortress population of 240 with little to no fortress or game optimization present. Anyone who has played DF knows how ludicrous that is. My previous rig, with its overclocked i5, could handle a pop of 120 before slowing down to 60FPS, and ground to a halt at anything over 160.
Overall, this is quite possibly the best budget CPU out there. Don't let the fact that it only has two physical cores scare you: it's tough enough to handle anything you throw at it.
| Processor | 3.7 GHz core_i3 |
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