**The Value of CPUs: A Guide to Choosing the Right One for Your Needs**

When it comes to building or upgrading a computer, one of the most important components is the central processing unit (CPU). The CPU is the brain of your computer, responsible for executing instructions and handling calculations. With so many options available in the market, choosing the right CPU can be overwhelming. In this article, we'll explore the different types of CPUs, their features, and recommend which ones are worth considering based on your budget and needs.

**The Importance of Value**

At GamersAccess, we focus on providing value to our customers. We analyze various aspects of a product, including its performance, power consumption, and price, to determine whether it's worth the investment. When it comes to CPUs, we look at what benefits the average consumer or buyer. While high-end CPUs like i9s and i7s may offer impressive performance, they can be out of reach for many budgets.

For most people, a more affordable CPU will still provide excellent performance. In fact, many gamers and content creators use mid-range CPUs that offer a great balance between performance and price. We recommend considering the Intel Core i5 12,400 or AMD Ryzen 5 series for gaming PCs and production workloads.

**The Limitations of Budget-Friendly CPUs**

While more affordable CPUs can provide excellent value, they may not be suitable for all users. For example, if you're building a gaming PC that requires high-end performance, a budget-friendly CPU like the Intel Celeron or AMD A4 series might struggle to keep up.

However, for general office work, browsing the web, and lightweight productivity tasks, a budget-friendly CPU can suffice. In this case, we recommend considering the Intel Pentium G4600 or AMD Ryzen 3 series. These CPUs offer excellent performance for their price point and are well-suited for most office applications.

**The Benefits of Upgrading**

While it may not be necessary to upgrade your CPU immediately, doing so can provide significant benefits. If you're building a gaming PC or want to handle more demanding production workloads, upgrading to a higher-end CPU can make all the difference.

We recommend considering mid-range CPUs like the Intel Core i3 12,100 or AMD Ryzen 5 series for their excellent performance and value. These CPUs offer better performance than budget-friendly options while still being affordable.

**Using Pre-Built Systems**

Another option to consider is pre-built systems that come with a higher-end CPU at a lower price point. While the GPU may not be as powerful, the CPU can make up for it. Look for pre-built systems from reputable manufacturers like HP, Dell, or Lenovo, and check for discounts or promotions.

**The Limitations of Older CPUs**

If you're looking to buy an older CPU, be aware that they may lack some modern features and be less power-efficient than newer models. However, many older CPUs still offer excellent performance and value.

For example, the Intel Core i7 2600K or AMD FX-8350 are great options for those on a budget. While they may not have all the bells and whistles of newer CPUs, they provide exceptional performance for their price point.

**Conclusion**

Choosing the right CPU can be overwhelming with so many options available. At GamersAccess, we recommend considering your budget and needs before making a decision. For most users, a mid-range CPU like the Intel Core i5 12,400 or AMD Ryzen 5 series is an excellent choice. While higher-end CPUs may offer better performance, they can be out of reach for many budgets.

By following our recommendations and considering your options carefully, you'll be able to build or upgrade a computer that meets your needs without breaking the bank.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey everyone today we're reviewing the intel celeron g6900 cpu this is the ultimate low end this is an intel's alder like architecture family it is not technically part of the 12 000 series but it was launched alongside them the step up from this would be the pentium the cpu however is the cheapest we could get right now isn't available in stock today it was about 60 to 70 dollars might be as low as 50 so it's the ultra budget end of diy cpus we expect the pentium to be far more interesting from a gaming standpoint but they're hard to get right now the g7400 would be the one there that we're looking forward to looking at in benchmarks but today we're gonna be benchmarking this against the i3s and everything else although really we're more interested in how it performs just almost in a vacuum because it could open the door for certain types of pcs but at two cores we'll see before that this video is brought to you by evga's x570 dark motherboard the evga x570 dark is a high-end motherboard for am4 cpus built around extreme overclocking and tested heavily by evga's kin pen the x570 dark has a uniquely rotated socket and ram layout 90 degree rotated cables for ease of installation and management and tons of troubleshooting features to make building testing and overclocking easier check out evga's x570 dark high-end motherboard at the link in the description below so the pricing for this makes it make sense or at least somewhat appealing for maybe an h610 type of motherboard you don't benefit from the extra dim per channel that you lose if you don't know the differences between h610 h270 b60 so forth you can check our other video on that we'll link that in the description below but this is a good pairing for the cheaper stuff it makes the most sense from maybe a really lightweight office like home office type of pc if you do anything that's excel intensive like actually uses excel more than just some basics then this will start to struggle with it if you do really heavy web browsing a lot of tabs a lot of 4k video this is going to struggle with that too so the bar is pretty low gaming should therefore obviously not be expected to do extremely well on this either we are going to benchmark a bunch of our games uh so we'll have some easier stuff in there like rainbow six siege or cs go and then we'll have the more modern things like far cry 6 where you can expect this to fail spectacularly we'll also be looking at a couple of production applications but it's not worth going too in depth on them the very short of it is you should not be buying this for production applications like photoshop premiere um a lot of compression decompression code compile things like that this doesn't make any sense uh and you should try your hardest to buy something else even if it's a used sandy bridge or ivy bridge cpu of a higher tier class because you'll get more value there anyway as for the specs just to set the expectations here so the g6900 is on what intel calls intel 7 lithography so it's 10 nanometer process node it just launched it has two cores and two threads they are p cores they're performance cores there are zero e cores on this cpu it is simply two core two threads you haven't seen a two core two thread cpu on this channel in a really long time not sure the last time we looked at one was uh the lowest we've looked at more recently was four core stuff four core four thread old i5s so this is at the ultra low end it's 3.4 gigahertz the base frequency it only has four megabytes of total cache and then for the igp it does actually have integrated graphics it's got an intel uhd 710 in it not to be confused with the nvidia gt710 they are very different so that's the setup this is a really basic cpu uh again the use case for this is not really gaming but you can game on it something like a 2d side scrolling platformer along those lines should be no problem unless they do really crazy stuff with effects or uh i mean like you get into dwarf fortress and even though it looks simple it's a lot of cpu load so a different story for those but it can do some gaming we're going to benchmark that the pentium is where we think there will be a lot more interest intel has had a really good track record with pentiums the i think it was g 3568 or 32 58 something like that was actually an impressive performer for what it was but that was many years ago like six or eight years or something like that i think scott watson was still working on tech report at the time so uh it's been a little while pentiums are what we're interested in celerons are what's available also really important note for today we're going to be doing a lot more frame time plots for this one so quick recap for you the typical graphs we do are bar charts and it shows average one percent and point one percent low fps that gives you an overall recap of the performance in terms of frame rate in the game but frame time plots show us the frame to frame time required or the frame of the frame interval to present using on percent a frame to the player uh once that exceeds eight to twelve milliseconds excursion from frame n minus one so the previous frame you start to notice it as a player in most instances certainly 50 milliseconds and higher is bad so we're going to look at a lot of frame time plots in this one those will tell you the full picture for this thing we'll start with csgo benchmarking just because it's one of the few things that a celeron should reasonably be expected to play sort of the celeron g6900 ran at 91 fps average comparatively this is bad the next closest cpu is the r7 2700x which still holds a lead of 100 in average fps and in low performance alike now the g6900 also has some frame time issues that aren't revealed in this plot but we'll show that in a moment the i3 12 100 f is 177 percent ahead it's far enough ahead that percentages are now silly so there's actually really strong value in the upgrade to an i3 instead it's about two times more money yes at 100 to 120 instead of 50 to 70 but it's more than double the performance and that starts to fade as you get above the i3 price class the value slides as you get towards the higher end this would be worth strongly considering if you can stretch the budget up to the 120 i3 if not the celeron is technically holding on we don't foresee its usable life lasting very far in the future and certainly not in sensitive games today which is most games because two cores is ridiculous for gaming it's more of an office pc 1440p doesn't change anything in the celeron class that's expected this increases gpu load not cpu load by moving to 1440. however we're already entirely cpu bound on the cpu so we remain cpu bound the result is therefore the same the increased resolution just means the gpu does a little more work here but otherwise it's the same story here's where it's more interesting this is the frame time plot this shows the frame to frame intervals for each frame rendered measured in milliseconds ideally there's not more than eight to twelve millisecond excursions from frame n minus one but in this chart we see several frames that took upwards of 50 milliseconds to complete rendering and then present to the user this means that there will be a few hitches and gameplay that the player can definitely feel so although the average fps and even the lows looked okay in the charts a couple of these spikes if they happened at the wrong time could still ruin a match for you that's why collecting frame times is important one percent and point one percent lows help and they do help point us towards potential issues but this plot is required to explore the issue and there definitely is one up next is cyberpunk 2077 this one is in stark contrast to cs go because it didn't run at all the celeron is trying to run cyberpunk and when it tried to run it it looked kind of like this unfortunately we weren't able to get past the menu screen and into the buggy gameplay but upon loading the levels to our saved game files we were presented with a black screen and then it stopped the celeron gets a failing grade here it ran at zero fps average also just zero fps period dnf far cry 6 at 1080p also had problems with the celeron it just wasn't able to keep up and the cpu was loaded at 100 the lack of available resources led to constantly dropping frames and extended frame render times with a 14 fps average and 6 fps 0.1 low the frame time plot when we get to it will look completely unplayable this cpu isn't even worth thinking about if you want to play games like this although it maybe seems okay for some lighter weight games if you're on an extreme budget some of the modern indie titles or games that are maybe 2d platformer style no problem for most of those but far cry 6 is too much far cry 6 frame times are insane in this chart you can see them bouncing between about 40 and 90 milliseconds for most of the range but the excursions to 160 and 180 milliseconds are bad the regular spikes to 100 to 120 milliseconds mean that if the 14 fps average didn't already prove it this game is completely unplayable on the cpu let's go back to something that celeron is more capable of handling in rainbow six siege at 1080p the celeron averaged 119 fps average on its two cores and threat with the lows distant at 26 fps 0.1 percent the lows are important here because although they look a lot better than far cry the bars illustrate how disproportionate the scaling is from other cpus on the plot we're always looking for relative performance from one cpu to another and in this example the celeron looks great with its 120 fps average considering the price that is but it teeters on territory of being unplayable due to the frame time and consistency the i3 12 100 f quadruples the average frame rate while also pulling the lows up to better territory for competitive gaming it's amazing actually how much scaling there is here because the celeron is low enough in the stack that almost anything will show a non-linear improvement in a good way and we're seeing that with the i3 we're also seeing that with older cpus like the r5 3600 and similar basically everything so it is impressive we want to be clear that the celeron can hit the average as it's hitting here it's just the average isn't the only aspect of testing here's the frame time plot to sort of help that in this one the frame times are overall actually pretty good except for sharp spikes to 40 milliseconds plus when they happen they happen somewhat regularly unfortunately but they don't seem to map to any particular in-game action the plot isn't nearly as bad as far cry 6 and this game can be played on the celeron but you may want to tune some settings down to try and reduce the frequency or the rate of occurrence of these spikes f1 2021 is another game that's easy to run looking at this chart you can see that most of our high-end cpus are running into a gpu bottleneck there's no useful data to be had on the top half of the charge so we can't differentiate between one cpu and the next when they're bouncing off of a limit the lower half remains useful though the celeron g6900 runs at 100 fps average this looks great as an average again but it struggles in the lows it's the same story repeated as last time the i3 12 100 f would be a significant meaningful and most importantly noticeable upgrade in almost all scenarios involving more than a very low end game this is in contrast to the say 12 100 f and the 12 400 where although the 12 400 is better the advantage becomes a little bit more subjective and less immediately obvious to all users we'll go back to gta 5 for an older school look at performance even when this game came out for pc it was uncommon to have a 2 core cpu for a gaming machine 4 cores was the most common at the time the celeron ran at 54 fps average but had dismal lows sadly it's unplayable with our settings you could maybe tune it down but our goal is to review a product in a standard environment not make things just work on it anything on this chart would be better maybe somewhat shockingly total war three kingdoms actually did okay in average fps we test this game with high settings which tends to be somewhat abusive on the gpu at the high end of the chart it is hard for the cpus and the memory but it depends on sort of the architecture you're testing with and the range of fps we're in this isn't anywhere near the top of the chart so we don't need to worry about the gpu or the memory being bottlenecked the average is held on okay overall but the story is the same and we'll stop here for games since the pattern is clear moving to production applications we'll start with blender cycles tile based rendering the celeron required 113 minutes to complete the render whereas the next slowest cpu in the current data set we have required 31 minutes the i3 reduced render time by 73 so you shouldn't plan on really doing any rendering work on the celeron it's not usable for this it's very painful you might have a cheap or old gpu line around that'll be better than this is for tile-based rendering you'd be better off pushing to cuda or opencl while compiling the chromium codebase we measured a 440-minute time requirement to complete the compile this isn't obviously the only type of compile that exists some of them are more cash heavy some are more core heavier frequency heavy but it gives us a pretty well-rounded look the 12100f reduces compile time by 70 percent making its relatively slow prior results now look at lightning fast again the celeron isn't a cpu that should be used in production work really at all you'd be better off buying a used system for this kind of work something like an ivy bridge system with an old i7 would do a lot better than this adobe premiere benchmarking has the g6900 scoring 220 points in aggregate a combined scorer determined by calculating the filtering the transformers the warps the saves live scrubbing playback and rendering performance the cpu is unusable for this task it's not even close to useful it'd be okay for some web browsing but it struggles with video playback especially in this capacity we actually had to modify our adobe premiere benchmark just to run on the cpu when we first ran the software kept quitting and giving up due to timeouts so we had to extend those timeout periods to accommodate it so wrapping up then we basically already told you what we thought right in the beginning this thing you know it's a fantastic lesson and why average fps alone isn't enough the industry has learned this at this point so it's not news but it is a good reminder because in cs go it looks pretty good the average was great for what it is the 0.1 percent low is which are an average by the way it's just it's an average of the lower end of the chart and the 0.1 low still looked okay as a bar they're disproportionate yes versus the other cpus but they looked okay then you look at the frame time plot and the picture comes together where it looks okay up to a point and then maybe once every let's say probably every 20 30 seconds while you're playing cs go uh at least maybe 15 you're gonna see some kind of hitch depending on what's going on the game the more action there is the more effects there are the more likely you are to run into problems with it especially the cpu bound effects so the frame time pacing with the cpu is really not good in pretty much any of the games we've tested uh it's sort of acceptable in maybe two games that we tested that was it and our cpu benchmarks are skewed towards the higher end that's where we focus so we leave room so that high-end cpus can differentiate themselves in the chart as well as down to about an i3 maybe an r3 or an apu but we don't typically plan for celeron class stuff you can see where it falls relative to everything else so you get some percent scaling there versus an i3 and i3 is a massive step up and one that you typically were pretty conservative about recommending people spend more money than maybe they set out to when they're watching a video because we really focus on value and what benefits the average consumer or buyer of a product and truthfully as we all know as we've talked about in our videos the difference between something like an i7 and an i9 or even an i5 12 400 and an i9 for a lot of people if you're doing a gaming pc although it's measurable and it may even be perceptible to a lot of players in competitive games or something like that or certainly in production workloads a lot of the time the value just isn't there it makes sense if you have a lot of money but for people who feel more constrained by their budget they shouldn't be outstretching what they can comfortably afford because there are more important things in life that you need to have money available for to pay for and so an i5 12 400 or an r55600x something like that is more than good enough it is those are great cpus but once you get down to the celeron level it starts to deteriorate a little bit the value increased to an i3 12 100 f at about 120 dollars so it's about two times the price but you are dealing with lower numbers here so it doesn't maybe doesn't hurt as much that difference your quadrupling and your frame rate but more importantly it's not just about going 4x or whatever it's about going from unplayable or unusable on things like blender premiere photoshop uh gaming to usable and a pretty good experience so this is one of the few instances where we would recommend trying to scrap together a little bit more money if you're building a gaming pc or anything that's going to do any type of production the celeron might have a place it's not really in our lab that doesn't mean it has no use it's just we don't particularly test for basic office function type computers office means small home office uh i don't know like maybe a dental office or something like that i don't know what kind of workload those machines go through but if it's something like appointment booking this will be able to handle that if it's just a web interface or something like that it's not gonna be able to run a lot of tabs it'll struggle with high end video it'll struggle with doing a lot of things at once but if all you need to do is open a web browser and make calendar appointments it's fine but that's so far away from what we do as a core business that i we have trouble i have trouble uh sort of bridging the gap making the recommendation so the recommendation we would make for our core audience and my team's core competence would be uh if you are trying to build a gaming pc something that could do lightweight production simple games probably consider the pentium but wait for a review on it if we can get it look at the i3 if that's out of reach that's fine you don't have to stretch for it but maybe consider a used system as well it's not like the gpu market where used cpus are atrociously expensive they've actually gotten a lot better so if you're looking at something like sandy bridge is getting pretty long on the tooth that would be the 2000 series intel cpus but some of them are still pretty good 2600k for example maybe look at ivy bridge or haswell it'll be 3 000 4000 series they lack some modern features uh they're not as power efficient as modern cpus but the performance jump is insane and you should be able to get some of those especially if they're in pre-built at decent prices so consider that route uh something like a 2700 would be a great consideration all 2600 x 20 600 really anything in the last few years at the lower end's gonna be better than this so um this is the type of cpu where the answer to is it worth upgrading is almost anything is better so that's it for this one very simple at the end of the day uh basically don't buy it unless you really have to and we'll be back with a pen and review hopefully soon thanks for watching subscribe for more as always go to store.gamersaccess.net you can go to patreon.com cameras access as well if you'd like to support us directly and if you go to the store you can grab something like the mod mats that i have in front of me this is a pc building work surface it is anti-static conductive for you to work on your components keep them safe and the surface you're working on protected as well while you work on uh components that have a bunch of metal sticking out of them like the back of a motherboard that's it for this one thanks for watching we'll see you all next timehey everyone today we're reviewing the intel celeron g6900 cpu this is the ultimate low end this is an intel's alder like architecture family it is not technically part of the 12 000 series but it was launched alongside them the step up from this would be the pentium the cpu however is the cheapest we could get right now isn't available in stock today it was about 60 to 70 dollars might be as low as 50 so it's the ultra budget end of diy cpus we expect the pentium to be far more interesting from a gaming standpoint but they're hard to get right now the g7400 would be the one there that we're looking forward to looking at in benchmarks but today we're gonna be benchmarking this against the i3s and everything else although really we're more interested in how it performs just almost in a vacuum because it could open the door for certain types of pcs but at two cores we'll see before that this video is brought to you by evga's x570 dark motherboard the evga x570 dark is a high-end motherboard for am4 cpus built around extreme overclocking and tested heavily by evga's kin pen the x570 dark has a uniquely rotated socket and ram layout 90 degree rotated cables for ease of installation and management and tons of troubleshooting features to make building testing and overclocking easier check out evga's x570 dark high-end motherboard at the link in the description below so the pricing for this makes it make sense or at least somewhat appealing for maybe an h610 type of motherboard you don't benefit from the extra dim per channel that you lose if you don't know the differences between h610 h270 b60 so forth you can check our other video on that we'll link that in the description below but this is a good pairing for the cheaper stuff it makes the most sense from maybe a really lightweight office like home office type of pc if you do anything that's excel intensive like actually uses excel more than just some basics then this will start to struggle with it if you do really heavy web browsing a lot of tabs a lot of 4k video this is going to struggle with that too so the bar is pretty low gaming should therefore obviously not be expected to do extremely well on this either we are going to benchmark a bunch of our games uh so we'll have some easier stuff in there like rainbow six siege or cs go and then we'll have the more modern things like far cry 6 where you can expect this to fail spectacularly we'll also be looking at a couple of production applications but it's not worth going too in depth on them the very short of it is you should not be buying this for production applications like photoshop premiere um a lot of compression decompression code compile things like that this doesn't make any sense uh and you should try your hardest to buy something else even if it's a used sandy bridge or ivy bridge cpu of a higher tier class because you'll get more value there anyway as for the specs just to set the expectations here so the g6900 is on what intel calls intel 7 lithography so it's 10 nanometer process node it just launched it has two cores and two threads they are p cores they're performance cores there are zero e cores on this cpu it is simply two core two threads you haven't seen a two core two thread cpu on this channel in a really long time not sure the last time we looked at one was uh the lowest we've looked at more recently was four core stuff four core four thread old i5s so this is at the ultra low end it's 3.4 gigahertz the base frequency it only has four megabytes of total cache and then for the igp it does actually have integrated graphics it's got an intel uhd 710 in it not to be confused with the nvidia gt710 they are very different so that's the setup this is a really basic cpu uh again the use case for this is not really gaming but you can game on it something like a 2d side scrolling platformer along those lines should be no problem unless they do really crazy stuff with effects or uh i mean like you get into dwarf fortress and even though it looks simple it's a lot of cpu load so a different story for those but it can do some gaming we're going to benchmark that the pentium is where we think there will be a lot more interest intel has had a really good track record with pentiums the i think it was g 3568 or 32 58 something like that was actually an impressive performer for what it was but that was many years ago like six or eight years or something like that i think scott watson was still working on tech report at the time so uh it's been a little while pentiums are what we're interested in celerons are what's available also really important note for today we're going to be doing a lot more frame time plots for this one so quick recap for you the typical graphs we do are bar charts and it shows average one percent and point one percent low fps that gives you an overall recap of the performance in terms of frame rate in the game but frame time plots show us the frame to frame time required or the frame of the frame interval to present using on percent a frame to the player uh once that exceeds eight to twelve milliseconds excursion from frame n minus one so the previous frame you start to notice it as a player in most instances certainly 50 milliseconds and higher is bad so we're going to look at a lot of frame time plots in this one those will tell you the full picture for this thing we'll start with csgo benchmarking just because it's one of the few things that a celeron should reasonably be expected to play sort of the celeron g6900 ran at 91 fps average comparatively this is bad the next closest cpu is the r7 2700x which still holds a lead of 100 in average fps and in low performance alike now the g6900 also has some frame time issues that aren't revealed in this plot but we'll show that in a moment the i3 12 100 f is 177 percent ahead it's far enough ahead that percentages are now silly so there's actually really strong value in the upgrade to an i3 instead it's about two times more money yes at 100 to 120 instead of 50 to 70 but it's more than double the performance and that starts to fade as you get above the i3 price class the value slides as you get towards the higher end this would be worth strongly considering if you can stretch the budget up to the 120 i3 if not the celeron is technically holding on we don't foresee its usable life lasting very far in the future and certainly not in sensitive games today which is most games because two cores is ridiculous for gaming it's more of an office pc 1440p doesn't change anything in the celeron class that's expected this increases gpu load not cpu load by moving to 1440. however we're already entirely cpu bound on the cpu so we remain cpu bound the result is therefore the same the increased resolution just means the gpu does a little more work here but otherwise it's the same story here's where it's more interesting this is the frame time plot this shows the frame to frame intervals for each frame rendered measured in milliseconds ideally there's not more than eight to twelve millisecond excursions from frame n minus one but in this chart we see several frames that took upwards of 50 milliseconds to complete rendering and then present to the user this means that there will be a few hitches and gameplay that the player can definitely feel so although the average fps and even the lows looked okay in the charts a couple of these spikes if they happened at the wrong time could still ruin a match for you that's why collecting frame times is important one percent and point one percent lows help and they do help point us towards potential issues but this plot is required to explore the issue and there definitely is one up next is cyberpunk 2077 this one is in stark contrast to cs go because it didn't run at all the celeron is trying to run cyberpunk and when it tried to run it it looked kind of like this unfortunately we weren't able to get past the menu screen and into the buggy gameplay but upon loading the levels to our saved game files we were presented with a black screen and then it stopped the celeron gets a failing grade here it ran at zero fps average also just zero fps period dnf far cry 6 at 1080p also had problems with the celeron it just wasn't able to keep up and the cpu was loaded at 100 the lack of available resources led to constantly dropping frames and extended frame render times with a 14 fps average and 6 fps 0.1 low the frame time plot when we get to it will look completely unplayable this cpu isn't even worth thinking about if you want to play games like this although it maybe seems okay for some lighter weight games if you're on an extreme budget some of the modern indie titles or games that are maybe 2d platformer style no problem for most of those but far cry 6 is too much far cry 6 frame times are insane in this chart you can see them bouncing between about 40 and 90 milliseconds for most of the range but the excursions to 160 and 180 milliseconds are bad the regular spikes to 100 to 120 milliseconds mean that if the 14 fps average didn't already prove it this game is completely unplayable on the cpu let's go back to something that celeron is more capable of handling in rainbow six siege at 1080p the celeron averaged 119 fps average on its two cores and threat with the lows distant at 26 fps 0.1 percent the lows are important here because although they look a lot better than far cry the bars illustrate how disproportionate the scaling is from other cpus on the plot we're always looking for relative performance from one cpu to another and in this example the celeron looks great with its 120 fps average considering the price that is but it teeters on territory of being unplayable due to the frame time and consistency the i3 12 100 f quadruples the average frame rate while also pulling the lows up to better territory for competitive gaming it's amazing actually how much scaling there is here because the celeron is low enough in the stack that almost anything will show a non-linear improvement in a good way and we're seeing that with the i3 we're also seeing that with older cpus like the r5 3600 and similar basically everything so it is impressive we want to be clear that the celeron can hit the average as it's hitting here it's just the average isn't the only aspect of testing here's the frame time plot to sort of help that in this one the frame times are overall actually pretty good except for sharp spikes to 40 milliseconds plus when they happen they happen somewhat regularly unfortunately but they don't seem to map to any particular in-game action the plot isn't nearly as bad as far cry 6 and this game can be played on the celeron but you may want to tune some settings down to try and reduce the frequency or the rate of occurrence of these spikes f1 2021 is another game that's easy to run looking at this chart you can see that most of our high-end cpus are running into a gpu bottleneck there's no useful data to be had on the top half of the charge so we can't differentiate between one cpu and the next when they're bouncing off of a limit the lower half remains useful though the celeron g6900 runs at 100 fps average this looks great as an average again but it struggles in the lows it's the same story repeated as last time the i3 12 100 f would be a significant meaningful and most importantly noticeable upgrade in almost all scenarios involving more than a very low end game this is in contrast to the say 12 100 f and the 12 400 where although the 12 400 is better the advantage becomes a little bit more subjective and less immediately obvious to all users we'll go back to gta 5 for an older school look at performance even when this game came out for pc it was uncommon to have a 2 core cpu for a gaming machine 4 cores was the most common at the time the celeron ran at 54 fps average but had dismal lows sadly it's unplayable with our settings you could maybe tune it down but our goal is to review a product in a standard environment not make things just work on it anything on this chart would be better maybe somewhat shockingly total war three kingdoms actually did okay in average fps we test this game with high settings which tends to be somewhat abusive on the gpu at the high end of the chart it is hard for the cpus and the memory but it depends on sort of the architecture you're testing with and the range of fps we're in this isn't anywhere near the top of the chart so we don't need to worry about the gpu or the memory being bottlenecked the average is held on okay overall but the story is the same and we'll stop here for games since the pattern is clear moving to production applications we'll start with blender cycles tile based rendering the celeron required 113 minutes to complete the render whereas the next slowest cpu in the current data set we have required 31 minutes the i3 reduced render time by 73 so you shouldn't plan on really doing any rendering work on the celeron it's not usable for this it's very painful you might have a cheap or old gpu line around that'll be better than this is for tile-based rendering you'd be better off pushing to cuda or opencl while compiling the chromium codebase we measured a 440-minute time requirement to complete the compile this isn't obviously the only type of compile that exists some of them are more cash heavy some are more core heavier frequency heavy but it gives us a pretty well-rounded look the 12100f reduces compile time by 70 percent making its relatively slow prior results now look at lightning fast again the celeron isn't a cpu that should be used in production work really at all you'd be better off buying a used system for this kind of work something like an ivy bridge system with an old i7 would do a lot better than this adobe premiere benchmarking has the g6900 scoring 220 points in aggregate a combined scorer determined by calculating the filtering the transformers the warps the saves live scrubbing playback and rendering performance the cpu is unusable for this task it's not even close to useful it'd be okay for some web browsing but it struggles with video playback especially in this capacity we actually had to modify our adobe premiere benchmark just to run on the cpu when we first ran the software kept quitting and giving up due to timeouts so we had to extend those timeout periods to accommodate it so wrapping up then we basically already told you what we thought right in the beginning this thing you know it's a fantastic lesson and why average fps alone isn't enough the industry has learned this at this point so it's not news but it is a good reminder because in cs go it looks pretty good the average was great for what it is the 0.1 percent low is which are an average by the way it's just it's an average of the lower end of the chart and the 0.1 low still looked okay as a bar they're disproportionate yes versus the other cpus but they looked okay then you look at the frame time plot and the picture comes together where it looks okay up to a point and then maybe once every let's say probably every 20 30 seconds while you're playing cs go uh at least maybe 15 you're gonna see some kind of hitch depending on what's going on the game the more action there is the more effects there are the more likely you are to run into problems with it especially the cpu bound effects so the frame time pacing with the cpu is really not good in pretty much any of the games we've tested uh it's sort of acceptable in maybe two games that we tested that was it and our cpu benchmarks are skewed towards the higher end that's where we focus so we leave room so that high-end cpus can differentiate themselves in the chart as well as down to about an i3 maybe an r3 or an apu but we don't typically plan for celeron class stuff you can see where it falls relative to everything else so you get some percent scaling there versus an i3 and i3 is a massive step up and one that you typically were pretty conservative about recommending people spend more money than maybe they set out to when they're watching a video because we really focus on value and what benefits the average consumer or buyer of a product and truthfully as we all know as we've talked about in our videos the difference between something like an i7 and an i9 or even an i5 12 400 and an i9 for a lot of people if you're doing a gaming pc although it's measurable and it may even be perceptible to a lot of players in competitive games or something like that or certainly in production workloads a lot of the time the value just isn't there it makes sense if you have a lot of money but for people who feel more constrained by their budget they shouldn't be outstretching what they can comfortably afford because there are more important things in life that you need to have money available for to pay for and so an i5 12 400 or an r55600x something like that is more than good enough it is those are great cpus but once you get down to the celeron level it starts to deteriorate a little bit the value increased to an i3 12 100 f at about 120 dollars so it's about two times the price but you are dealing with lower numbers here so it doesn't maybe doesn't hurt as much that difference your quadrupling and your frame rate but more importantly it's not just about going 4x or whatever it's about going from unplayable or unusable on things like blender premiere photoshop uh gaming to usable and a pretty good experience so this is one of the few instances where we would recommend trying to scrap together a little bit more money if you're building a gaming pc or anything that's going to do any type of production the celeron might have a place it's not really in our lab that doesn't mean it has no use it's just we don't particularly test for basic office function type computers office means small home office uh i don't know like maybe a dental office or something like that i don't know what kind of workload those machines go through but if it's something like appointment booking this will be able to handle that if it's just a web interface or something like that it's not gonna be able to run a lot of tabs it'll struggle with high end video it'll struggle with doing a lot of things at once but if all you need to do is open a web browser and make calendar appointments it's fine but that's so far away from what we do as a core business that i we have trouble i have trouble uh sort of bridging the gap making the recommendation so the recommendation we would make for our core audience and my team's core competence would be uh if you are trying to build a gaming pc something that could do lightweight production simple games probably consider the pentium but wait for a review on it if we can get it look at the i3 if that's out of reach that's fine you don't have to stretch for it but maybe consider a used system as well it's not like the gpu market where used cpus are atrociously expensive they've actually gotten a lot better so if you're looking at something like sandy bridge is getting pretty long on the tooth that would be the 2000 series intel cpus but some of them are still pretty good 2600k for example maybe look at ivy bridge or haswell it'll be 3 000 4000 series they lack some modern features uh they're not as power efficient as modern cpus but the performance jump is insane and you should be able to get some of those especially if they're in pre-built at decent prices so consider that route uh something like a 2700 would be a great consideration all 2600 x 20 600 really anything in the last few years at the lower end's gonna be better than this so um this is the type of cpu where the answer to is it worth upgrading is almost anything is better so that's it for this one very simple at the end of the day uh basically don't buy it unless you really have to and we'll be back with a pen and review hopefully soon thanks for watching subscribe for more as always go to store.gamersaccess.net you can go to patreon.com cameras access as well if you'd like to support us directly and if you go to the store you can grab something like the mod mats that i have in front of me this is a pc building work surface it is anti-static conductive for you to work on your components keep them safe and the surface you're working on protected as well while you work on uh components that have a bunch of metal sticking out of them like the back of a motherboard that's it for this one thanks for watching we'll see you all next time\n"