If trying to make a gaming PC on a very tight budget this chip can offer pretty good performance for the price. Many games will be playable with no issue such as indie game. While there may be a bottleneck with high end AAA games, for the price you can not really beat the performance given.
For those looking to get more performance out of the card, it is easily overclockable. It is recommended to use a third party cooler to achieve this in order for the card to receive better cooling at higher temps, but may well be worth it over spending money on a more expensive GPU.
As a dual core budget CPU that is overclockable, the performance out of this chip is commendable, but for high end gaming it may be a bottleneck for performance. Those looking to play many AAA games on high settings will experience some performance issues.
This is only a dual core CPU which means it will have poor hyperthreading when comparing to CPUs with 4 or more cores. While few games take advantage of hyperthreading, the ones that do will see drastically worse performance on this CPU when compared to something like an i5 or 8350.
Being that this is a Haswell chip that uses the LGA 1150 socket, it is quite easy to find cheap motherboards and cheap RAM (DDR3) to use in those motherboards. This makes a good option as it is still a powerful chip comparable to even newer ones but allows for a wide selection of compatible parts. It also is a good choice for those that are already using a LGA 1150 compatible motherboard and would just like to upgrade from a less powerful CPU.
When comparing to CPUs in a similar price range such as the AMD 8350, this Intel chip is more efficient for power use. That means less heat and a lower power bill. While newer generation Intel chips may have a slight advantage here, they will be more expensive as well, so this makes a good choice if heat, power and efficiency are a concern in this price range.
Even though this is a quad-core device, there is no hypethreading built into the chip meaning any apps or games that can take advantage of the multiple cores through hyperthreading will be unable to see that performance using this chip.
For those interested, this CPU is easily overclockable, which allows for more performance. A third party cooler is recommended, but can be worth it in order to squeeze a bit more out of this chip.
This is good for games that can utilize multithreading using more than 4 cores in a CPU, meaning better performance. While there are very few games that take advantage of this, the few that do should work quite well.
This chip uses quite a bit of power when compared to a similar performing chip from Intel, which could mean a higher power bill in the long run. The high power consumption also leads to a lot of heat generated from this chip. While a third party cooler can help with this (and is recommended as the stock cooler is loud and does a poor job of cooling), it is an extra cost to using this chip efficiently.
Considering most games are single threaded using a CPU that does not work as well with them as Intle may be a detriment to ones experience. While this CPU can handle plenty of games it may come down to price for performance whether it is worth it in a hardcore gaming rig.
Games that couldn't possibly run and play according to their specs (such as requiring an i5 as a minimum) in fact run perfectly with 60 FPS sharp and the highest possible settings.
yup thats one of his biggest con . if you cheap out on ram youll have troubble haveing good fps . the difference between 2133 Mhz ddr4 and 3200 Mhz ddr4 is night and day . why you ask me ? because its an apu so it does not have that fancy GDDR5 as memory buffer to stock textures and what not in it . it use your system ram to store textures etc in , wich between 3200 ddr4 and a much higher 7000 Mhz GDDR5 its night and day FPS wise . so if you have no money for a gpu but 50-80$ to spare , pick this up as it will play new games just fin in 720p .