£10 vs 10p CPU

This is a 10 pence CPU – that’s £0.1 – and this is a £10 CPU. I want to know how terrible a 10p CPU is, and how much more performance you’ll get spending 100 times more money. Let’s meet the contenders, shall we? Our budget option – well… let’s face it both are budget options, but the most budget option possible… That is an Intel i3-4150. This is a decade old CPU, a Haswell part that was $117 new, but a decade later is just ten pence at CeX. It’s sporting just two cores – although it does feature hyperthreading for four total threads, and runs at 3.5GHz with a 54W TDP. The comparatively premium chip is an i5-4690K, a Devil’s Canyon CPU which is actually a slightly older part, despite actually being a refresh of the “4th generation” chips – I know, Intel invited me to their offices to show us these chips when new! God that was a long time ago now.. I’ve been doing this for nearly 13 years now… Anyway, this is a quad core without hyperthreading that boosts up to 3.9GHz, with an 88W TDP, and an original price tag of $243. Nowadays though it’s readily available for just £10 at CeX. Depreciation stings, doesn’t it?

Now I could stick an RX 7900 XTX in here and see just how bottlenecked it’d be, and I get it, that’d be funny, and hey if you want to see that let me know in the comments and maybe I’ll make it happen, but for this one I wanted to go for a pretty realistic GPU choice for someone who might be spending literal pennies on a CPU. I opted for an RTX 2060, as these can be had for under £100 but are still actually good enough for gaming at decent framerates. I’ve opted for 16GB of RAM here in this MSI Z97 mATX motherboard, which amazingly does actually have an M.2 slot that I can use to boot from with ease. Amazing, I know! I’m even using a PCIe Gen4x4 SSD in there, although it is not running at full speed at all. It can run at PCIe Gen 3 though which is a surprise for the age too. Right off the bat though, this presents one of the biggest problems with these aging and frankly underpowered by modern standards CPUs. Loading games, even from that NVMe SSD, was a painfully slow experience. Maybe loading from a SATA SSD might have been a touch better, but my experience using both of these was enough to drive me mad. Loading the Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark legitimately took five minutes – just to load it – and load a bunch of games took their sweet time too. That’s already a black mark for both of them.

Luckily I managed to preserve just enough sanity to run a handful of games at 1080p on low to medium settings on both chips, so let’s take a look. Starting with CS2 there is quite the performance difference here – the 4690K is offering 48 percent more performance over the 4150, that’s 76.8 FPS versus 113.9 FPS. That is substantial – it’s practically 60hz vs 120hz, which makes a pretty massive difference to the smoothness in game. Interestingly though, the 1% lows are only around 15 percent faster, although seeing as this is CS that really isn’t a surprise. 

Interestingly, Rainbow 6 Siege is much much closer – the 4690K is just 9 percent faster at 130.8 FPS versus 119.6 FPS on the 4150. That’s a much more playable experience for sure – I mean that is on medium settings so you’ve actually got some room to drop that for a bit more if you’d prefer. The main downside to trying to play Siege on these CPUs – the 4150 in particular – is that especially after an update, which takes twice as long as it should by the way, it takes around 20 minutes to just launch Siege thanks to it pre-compiling shaders. That process on its own takes between 10 and 15 minutes. That’s where you get stung here, not so much the raw performance.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider shows a more substantial difference – basically 40% more performance on the 4690K at 75 FPS, versus 54 FPS on the 4150. That might still actually be playable, but I know I’d rather have the 4690K here. The interesting thing here though is the 1% lows – they are functionally identical between the two chips, which shows just how unstable they are. Even just watching the tests you can see that, with assets popping in, it’s a stuttery mess. Really anything CPU intensive really struggles here. 

And as if by magic, that brings us nicely onto Hitman 3. The built in benchmark here lets me split the CPU and GPU data out, and obviously this is the CPU data. It’s also a very CPU physics heavy test, which shows here. Just 16.6 FPS from the 4690K, and an appalling 11.6 FPS from the 4150. Neither of these is a playable experience – the benchmark spent a decent amount of time halted completely, and no matter how many times I ran it it was just terrible to watch. Clearly Hitman is not a game series you’ll be playing on these chips, which is a shame because I really like it!

Something I haven’t benchmarked in quite a while, but feels relevant here is GTA V. Again using the built in benchmark for some consistency, that tends to lean on the CPU a fair bit too with all the NPCs, and unsurprisingly the dual core 4150 really struggled. Just 38.5 FPS average, versus over 80 FPS for the quad core. That is 117 percent more performance, albeit for around 10,000 percent more money. Personally, I think it’s worth it here. GTA V was a playable experience on the 4690K, and just dreadful on the 4150, so that’s a win for the, relatively, premium chip here.

And lastly we have Cyberpunk 2077 on low settings. This isn’t exactly amazing for either chip, at 44 and 54 FPS for the i3 and i5 respectively, but at least I’d consider the i5 somewhat playable. The 1% lows being at 30 FPS, compared to just 25 FPS, is definitely better, although still not exactly a smooth experience. Again Cyberpunk tends to be on the more CPU heavy side, at least depending on what area of the map you are in. Downtown where there’s lots of NPCs and cars, that chugs. In the badlands where NPCs are more scarce, you might get a more playable experience. 

On average the 4690K is 46.5 percent faster than the 4150, and in a number of games is genuinely playable where the i3 just isn’t. It’s clear that the 4150 just isn’t a worthwhile chip anymore – the dual core design has screwed it for modern usage. The stuttering, the fact they both take an absolute age to load games, and the stilted and sluggish operation really hurt both of their causes. I’m genuinely impressed how much performance a £10 CPU can offer, and yeah, a 10p CPU actually isn’t as bad as it sounds, but it’s still not fit for purpose. I think we need to investigate slightly higher price points to find out where the line is between great budget find and e-waste. Subscribe if you want to see that.