Just a little background as to why i am asking this question. so i work in IT for a school, and recently we bought some computers that they wanted to use in a CAD lab, except they were running Intel i3. so instead of returning them and shelling out a little more to get upgrades to i7's they just bought the i7's and had me replace them. I asked if i could buy a few of i3's for dirt cheap, and they said sure "we aren't going to use them".
so my question is would they work alright to make some decent gaming rigs? I want to make my young nephew a nice little gaming rig (so he can get away from that damn console. PMC! all the way) so he can play better games, and be like his "tio!" as he always says.
Any help would be appreciated
[Edit] Sorry, misunderstanding. I'm getting some i3's for cheap. I haven't bought them yet, i want to make sure that i can make something decent before i shell out the cash to buy them.
[Edit-2] i appreciate the feedback I've decided i'm going to go ahead and buy a few make my nephew a custom rig and maybe do a giveaway for one.
Well, first of all that's awesome you got cheap i7's i'm jelly. You really don't need that kind of power in your processor to play pc games, its more about your GPU and RAM, but its good to know you won't be bottlenecked.
OH! My bad, indeed I have... I would recommend at least an i5 for gaming but I believe Logan has put together several budget gaming builds around i3's.
How cheap is cheap? You might be better off taking the less altruistic option and make a quick return on them instead and buy him something he might like better. Perhaps you can use the money you make from that to buy an Anniversary pent or something better?
To actually answer your question, it should be pretty decent as a first chip for someone. I would say it's acceptable up to maybe a 270. I assume these are at least Haswell chips since you say they were recently bought.
I say all depends how much you bought them for and what model they are but if your pair them with a good GPU they would make pretty decent gaming rigs, especially for kids.
These will do you fine... Especially for the price. They will run a lot of decent graphics cards without problem and they would have run CAD just fine too... though the 3d rendering would have been a bit slow if the machines weren't doing that on the GPU... Anyway.. you gained off of someone elses stupidity... YEY! I would buy all of them up and sell the others on craigslist.. The school would just probably toss them after they were in storage for a while or something... unless they have a PC hardware class.
The only game I could see it struggling with is BF4 so i3s are just fine for playing 99.9% of games. But really I would look at using those i3s as low power home servers.
Built my nas (node 304) as a lan rig as well, so its an i3 4130 and a 260x plays most games just fine. Sure you are not going to be playing anything at high to ultra settings, but for a starter build it isn't to bad. Plus you can always upgrade the i3 down the line. Most games aren't even cpu intensive, all depends on what your nephew likes to play.
Wow that is a bargain, I'd put them in a system running a R9 270 or 750 ti it needs to be a power saving system, but i wouldn't go much past those GPU's since the CPU will majorly bottleneck them and just be a waste.
The i3 will play any game just fine long as your not pairing it with a monster vid card anything up to a r9 280 or gtx770 and 1080p. I have a Pentium G3220 with gtx650ti 2gb SC on a 1080p TV. The 650ti starts struggling before the Pentium G3220 does.
basicly for a budget gaming rig an i3 is not bad at all, pair it with a midrange GPU, like a 270X or GTX760, R9-280, and play games on 1080p, you will basicly be fine.
only a few games will start bottlenecking, but they will be still very well playable. Watchdogs, and metro last light, are 2 games, that will suffer a bit, but it will still be very well playable.