BUILD IT

Is it time to ditch the old gaming adage?

Are four cores still king in the gaming world? We find out.

SINCE THE LAUNCH of Intel’s Core series processors, way back in 2009, there’s been one simple rule associated with its mighty lineup of chips: If you’re into gaming, to avoid bottlenecks, you’re going to want to equip yourself with a Core i5, minimum. Four cores are king— any more, and you’re wasting your hardearned dollar; any fewer, and you’re in for a world of frame rate hurt.

However, a lot has changed since 2009. And although the incremental processor performance increases Intel has staggered out of the gates since then have been somewhat lackluster, cumulatively they’ve provided us consumers with about a 70–80 percent increase in computational performance.

So we got to thinking: As game devs still haven’t managed to take advantage of the multiple cores we already have, does that old saying still ring true? Do you still benefit from having a quadcore, high-clocked i5, over a dual-core i3? Or have those IPC improvements lead us into an age when you can get away with a cheaper Pentium for all your 1080p gaming needs? With Kaby Lake finally introducing Hyper-Threading on its Pentium range, allowing for dualcore and four-thread budget offerings, we decided to put it to the test in this quad-optioned mid-range build.