Intel 4 Core i3 14100F Raptor Lake Refresh CPU/Processor

Catch one of these at the right price and you're laughing. With Amazon prices fluctuating, sometimes wildly on any given day, these CPUs can be had for very little more than Pentium (if you can get hold of one) Stock cooler is quiet and looks good, although the fancy fin structure is purely for ornamental purposes, being made of plastic.

Fantastic little processor, it's light on power usage but has the power to handle most everyday tasks, I'd say it would even play up to modern games with a combined powerful GPU. Most PC's these days the bottlenck is the GPU not the CPU.

Disproportionally excellent price/performance when compared to anything else under £150.

Perfect.

Second one of these I've bought. Excellent price and very good speed for the price.

A good processor for an average home build if you pair it with 16 gigabyte of ram & a good SSD

I got this for Unreal Engine development as cheap way to build and develop games. Unreal Engine is single threaded, so this is as fast to start-up as an I9 counterpart from a couple of generations before. If you do not need the heat and running costs of a processor with more cores, this is the way to go.

It's easy to look at Intel's CPU lineup and dismiss i3 completely, with i7 and i9 serving the top end and i5 hitting the middle ground.But for budget builds and specific workloads, such as gaming, the i3 shines at it's price point. It only has 4 cores (8 threads), but the single core speed is phenomenal. And this is important, for workloads that require fewer threads, having those threads run fast is significant.I would not pair this CPU with mid to high end GPUs, but for budget RTX xx50/xx60 series GPUs it can more than keep up. The next step up to i5 more than doubles the cost, this step up should only be made given you have some production workloads or mid/high end GPUs to pair it with.