PC Builder: Kaby Lake for less

Is it time to ditch the old gaming adage? Zak Storey investigates.

THE CONCEPT

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 hard-earned 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 lacklustre, cumulatively, they’ve provided us consumers with about a 70–80% 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 quad-core, high-clocked i5 over a dual-core i3? Or have those IPC improvements led us into an age when you can get away with a cheaper Pentium for all your 1080p gaming needs? With Kaby Lake finally introducing hyperthreading on its Pentium range, allowing for dual-core and four-thread budget offerings, we decided to put it to the test in this quad-optioned mid-range build.