The Best Sub-£100 CPU

What To Buy

As there are a number of choices relating to factors such as discrete GPUs and of course your personal budget, we've split our recommendations into four areas below.

You have £50 and just need a good CPU - Intel Pentium G620
Intel’s Pentium G620 costs just £54 but managed respectable results in most of our tests, unlike AMD’s cheap offerings. The Intel Core i3 CPUs have a clear edge in our application benchmarks, but if you aren’t into gaming and just need a CPU that’s cheap and fast, you can’t go wrong with the G620. Its on-board GPU isn’t suitable for 3D gaming, but it means that you won’t have to spend money on a discrete graphics card if all you need is a Windows desktop or some idle Flash-based gaming. Make sure you buy an LGA1155 motherboard with an H- or Z-series chipset to access its on-board graphics – an H-series board will be cheaper and a better match.


You don't play games but need a fast CPU - Intel Core i3-2100
Intel’s Core i3-2100 is a fantastic £100 CPU. It’s fast in demanding applications such as video and photo editing, and just missed the top spot overall in our Media Benchmarks performance graphs. The Core i3-2100 is also very power-efficient. While its on-board graphics can’t play games, the i3-2100 is fine for a Windows desktop, media playback, GPU-accelerated video encoding and casual Flash games. You’ll need to pair it with an H- or Z-series LGA1155 motherboard to enable the on-board graphics; an H-series is a better match, as a Z68 motherboard will be relatively pricey.


You're a casual gamer with £100 to spend - AMD A8-3850
While Intel’s CPUs are faster at many demanding tasks such as video and image editing, their on-board GPUs are useless for 3D games. As such, you’d need to fork out another £100 for a capable graphics card if you opt for the Core i3-2100. However, AMD’s A8-3850 managed playable frame rates in Arma II at 1,280 x 720 with high settings. This is a massive feat for a system with a £100 processor with no separate graphics card, and means that less demanding games should prove no trouble. You’ll need to pair it with an FM1 motherboard rather than a Socket AM3 or Socket AM3+ model.


You're a gamer, plain and simple - AMD A8-3850
There’s little doubt that you need a discrete graphics card if you’re serious about gaming at high resolutions with high detail settings, and AA and AF enabled. With a Radeon HD 6850 1GB graphics card, the AMD A8-3850 easily managed playable frame rates in both our game tests, even at 1,920 x 1,080 on high settings. As an added bonus, unlike any of Intel’s budget CPUs, the A8-3850 can also be overclocked, yielding even more performance. It should also fare better with future games than Intel’s budget processors, as it has four cores rather than two.