Intel i3 i3-4160 Dual Core Processor (3.60GHz, Socket H3)

If you are looking for a Haswell i3 then the 4160 appears to be the 'no brainer' choice. If you do a little shopping around you will find less than £10 difference between this and the 4130 giving you a very significant 200mhz bump in performance. To get another increase in performance will push you over £100 which quite frankly is way to close to i5 prices to make any sense. I built a budget gaming machine using this and I am very impressed with the performance, paired with an NVidia GTX 760 and 8gb 1600mhz performance RAM it quite happily played anything at 1080p on a combination of ultra and high graphics presets. The only thing that had to be dialled down was anti-aliasing.The only reason I gave this 4 stars is more of a criticism towards Haswell itself in that I have noticed the chips produce significantly more heat than previous generations, I understand this is likely to do with the increased graphical performance of the Haswell chips but when paired with a discreet graphics card you are seeing no benefit only the increase in heat.

While this was launched in mid 2014, this is far from out of date. Yes, there are newer processors out there but for the price you pay, this is still excellent value for money.I was tasked by a family member to build a new pc for them, however they were on a bit of a budget. I had a look at a few CPUs but I knew from my experience that this chip was one of the better ones in the range I had looked at.While this is not ideal for a gaming rig of today standards, you can play GTA V without issue, although it also depends on what GPU you pick up but when I tested it with a GTX760 it worked wonderful.As for the heat, I have to be honest and say that the temperatures never got above a worrying level for me when I tested it on the test bench. If you find that you have issues with cooling, then perhaps look at getting a small after market CPU heatsink or maybe water cooling option.

I am using this whilst saving for an i7 4790k. It works well in aaa games paired with my evga gtx 670 ftw and msi z87m gaming mobo, 8gb ram. The hyperthreading is a boon for the price and is a must have. If you are thinking of getting the penguin dual cores I would suggest paying the extra £25 as you can notice the difference. If you are going to try and future proof your system for the next couple of years for gaming, I would suggest going for an i5 or i7 k series. This works great as a place holder cpu or for standard pc use (word,internet and average gaming) I do recommend

Great processor for the money. I used it with my starter gaming PC build and it runs fast and smooth at decent temperatures of around 55-60°C when running games like black ops 3. Paired this with an ASUS gtx 750ti 2gb and have had no trouble playing new games with a few tabs open on the internet. Brilliant processor for the money I'd recommend it.

Bought this as a replacement to a dead A8 APU after my PSU (amazon bought!) fried my PC.Partnered with a simple micro atx MSI board, some good RAM and my old discrete card that I had out of my PC at the time. I'd never worked with Intel chips before but they are dead simple to lock in. The stock cooler is super quiet. Be sure to unravel the wires from around it first as if not they catch.I'm very impressed with this CPU which I use for my home office & light gaming PC. I'm a total Intel convert.

Brilliant CPU. I bought this for gaming, My previous AMD FX 4100, just wasn't cutting the mustard anymore and being a student I was on a strict budget. I can say this cpu handles GTA V, I have it paired with a AMD HD 7850 GPU and although it won't play eveything at 1080p 60fps, it is more than adequate for a sub £100 CPU.

For me, this (or the 4170) is the ideal processor for a standard family or home office PC. The socket (1150) leaves plenty of room for a future upgrade dependent on your motherboard and can handle most tasks with ease. I'd even recommend it for a budget gaming build too. Will be buying again for a future build.

Playing Batman Arkham Knight in 1080p. Does the job fine! Using with Geforce 750 Ti and 16GB ram.If building budget pc with future proof. Can swap for an i7 in 5 years down the line.