I would like to ask if anyone could tell me the difference, in layman's terms, between these CPUs.
I'm trying to decide which is a better upgrade for the money. Its for a friend who basically plays Skyrim (or wants to be able to) and currently owns an old Athlon II 64bit 4400,2gb DDR400 ram,GT7800,A8nE mobo system. He's trying to upgrade as close to 100 bucks as he can.
I'm giving him 4gb of ddr3 1600 ram and my old GT240 vid card so he only needs the mobo and cpu.
For that price range I see the following chipsets (the mobo is not important atm, just the cpu):
Intel:
Intel Pentium G620 Sandy Bridge 2.6GHz LGA 1155 65W Dual-Core Desktop
Intel Celeron G555 Sandy Bridge 2.7GHz LGA 1155 Dual-Core
and:
AMD:
AMD A6-5400K Trinity 3.6GHz (3.8GHz Turbo) Socket FM2 65W Dual-Core Desktop APU (CPU + GPU) with DirectX 11 Graphic AMD Radeon HD 7540D
AMD A8-3850 Llano 2.9GHz Socket FM1 100W Quad-Core Desktop APU (CPU + GPU) with DirectX 11 Graphic AMD Radeon HD 6550D
Note: I may convince him to go to 150 to get either:
Phenom II quad core 3.2ghz black edition
AMD FX-4100 Zambezi 3.6GHz (3.8GHz Turbo) Socket AM3+ 95W Quad-Core Desktop Processor
instead but its up to him.
I've looked up benchmark comparison tests and it SEEMS that for skyrim the Intel G620 and G555 have almost the same performance as all the AMD chipsets listed below.
However I'm not that all familiar with this so I'd like to ask the more experienced: If it was you, which CPU would you pick?
recommendation, with any of what is listed, it's a $100 waste of money and will be difficult to do without putting together a completely oudated upgrade, especially with an intel solution. an intel g860 on an intel z77 chipset mobo (even if it's a micro atx) would be a much better and cost effective upgrade...that combination will give your friend good performance for now and a solid upgrade path for later if he wants.
4gb of ram would be fine if he is going to run windows xp. if there is any plans to run win7 or win8 64bit, 8gb will be the desired amount.
