AMD FX-8320E $119

Historically, AMD has always been the go-to company for budget builds and cheap CPUs. Recently, however, AMD has put more time and effort into developing its Kaveri line. Although boasting relatively impressive integrated graphics, Kaveri lacks a great deal of computational power, enabling Intel to dominate the scene. That said, you can still find yourself a solid AMD gaming CPU, just as long as you’re willing to give up native USB 3.0, PCIe 3.0, and additional SATA 6Gb/s functionality for the sake of your budget.

For this build, we settled on an FX-8320E. Despite being an ageing processor, this little beauty’s eight cores should be more than enough to drive the latest games at 1080p and beyond. And if DX12’s multicore-loving features are anything to go by, this CPU should be able to pump out some impressive benchmarks later on in its lifetime. The chip comes in at $119, featuring eight cores, running on a base clock of 3.2GHz (turboing up to 4GHz), and offering up support for DDR3 memory up to 2,400MHz on the AM3+ socket. Although not the tsunami of rendering power that you’d find on an Intel chip, the CPU performs admirably for everyday computational tasks.

The alternative solution from Intel would be the Core i5-4460 (it’s a budget-friendly Haswell chip.) Its four cores provide very similar performance, but it isn’t overclockable, meaning you won’t be able to increase those numbers any time soon. Despite this, it does provide PCIe 3.0, more SATA 6Gb/s ports, and native USB 3.0 support, giving it the slight edge when it comes to the feature set.