If you’re after a market-leading chip and board, this is this is the way to go…
Picking a CPU and motherboard combination is one of the most frustrating parts of building a new system, but it has to be done early on so you can build the rest of your system around it. If you’re starting with an Intel system, this is the guide for you.
Why Intel?
Before you decide what chip and motherboard you buy, you should decide whether you even want to buy one of Intel’s processors. Intel CPUs tend to be more expensive than AMD’s, but right now they’re still significantly better when it comes to the performance they offer. Their integrated graphics aren’t quite as strong, but if you’re pairing the chip with a separate GPU, that makes virtually no difference. Certainly, gamers shouldn’t be looking at anything else.
Intel also has significantly more options when it comes to choosing motherboards. There’s more than double the number of Intel motherboards on the market than AMD ones, and while they might be quite similar to one another, you get the added benefit of being able to choose specific manufacturers or prices according to your preference.
Finally, Intel’s upgrade paths are more well-defined than AMD’s. It’s likely the next generation of Intel CPUs (both Kaby Lake and Cannonlake) will use the same socket as Skylake’s chips, whereas AMD’s will be based on an entirely new architecture that requires a new socket, so any AMD hardware you buy now will be effectively at the end of the update path. That isn’t necessarily unusual, but it’s not the case with this generation of Intel chips.
Intel’s CPUs
The two main consumer CPU lines Intel currently sells at retail are called Haswell and Skylake, with the latter being the newer of the two. The main practical distinction between them is that Haswell uses Socket LGA 1150, and Skylake uses Socket LGA 1151, which is important when it comes to choosing a motherboard.
Haswell chips were released in 2013 and 2014, and they use a 22nm microarchitecture, whereas Skylake chips were first released in 2015 and use a more efficient 14nm microarchitecture. Despite this, the chips are relatively similar in price. A 3.7GHz Core i3 chip costs around £95 regardless of which platform you choose, even though the Skylake chips are around 10-15% faster in benchmarks.
If you’re thinking about on-board GPUs, again Skylake’s are considerably better than Haswell’s. Most of the Haswell CPUs run the older Intel HD Graphics 4000 platform for graphical performance equivalent to some aging cards like the GeForce 8600 GT or Radeon HD 3670. Skylake chips run the new Iris GPU platform, which is significantly better – the equal of a GeForce GTX 465 or Radeon R7 360.
Both lines of chips are divided into several different models. From the worst-performing to the best, you’ll find:
Celeron
A dual-core, reduced-cache version of the platform. Celerons don’t have Hyper-Threading and are best purchased for simple-use systems rather than home or gaming PCs.
Pentium
Slightly more expensive, the main difference between Pentiums and Celerons is that they have more L3 cache. Although there’s some overlap, Pentiums generally have a higher clock speed than Celerons and are perhaps aimed at basic office systems and light, non-multimedia home setups.
Core i3
Where the previous two chips are broadly aimed at business and specialised use, the core chips are Intel’s consumer desktop CPUs. We’d recommend that anyone looking to build a multi-purpose desktop buy a Core i3 at the absolute minimum. Although still dual-core, Core i3s support Hyper-Threading, giving them an effective four cores, so they’re good for light gaming and multitasking. They also have better on-board graphics than Pentiums and Celerons, but would need to be paired with a graphics card to see any real gaming performance.
Core i5
Aimed at high-end consumers, the core i5 chips tend to be the best value of the Core lines, even though they’re quite expensive. Core i5 CPUs have four physical cores (without Hyper-Threading), so they’re better at multitasking and multithreading than the Core i3, and they combine that with faster clock speeds. Unless you’re an enthusiast or building a special-use system, we highly recommend shopping within the Core i5 line for home desktops.
Core i7
With 4 physical cores and Hyper-Threading up to 8 simultaneous threads, the Core i7 line is aimed at performance enthusiasts and those building systems for specialist purposes, such as 3D animation or video rendering. Performance in normal gaming and applications won’t be much better than the fastest Core i5 chips, and certainly won’t be proportional to the extra cost. The TDP is also around 30% higher than Core i5 chips, if that matters to you!
K-series
Intel core chips have historically been quite good at running overclocked, which is a good way to trade off some of a CPU’s lifespan for extra speed. When paired with the appropriate motherboard (of which more later), any chip with the K suffix in their model number can be overclocked. K-series chips may cost a little more than the same fixed-clock CPU, but only in the order of £5-£10, so unless you’re on a tight budget, it’s worth considering even if you’re not planning to overclock in the short term.
Other Variants
Some chips have suffixes other than K, so just in case you want to know: A ‘T’ suffix means ‘power optimised’ (with a lower TDP, but slightly worse performance for it). An ‘H’ suffix means ‘high performance graphics’, so the GPU might be slightly better than the surrounding models. Intel doesn’t divulge what a ‘P’ suffix means, but that tends to be the opposite of H – a slightly worse GPU than similar models. A ‘Q’ suffix means the chip is quad-core (if that’s notable), and a ‘U’ suffix means it’s ultra-low power. That’s not an exhaustive look at the chips available, of course – we’ve left out the high-end Haswell-E / Extreme Edition platform and the Xeon server platform, since most desktop users won’t be interested in those. But if you’re building a normal desktop PC, you should have all the information you need to pick the right CPU for you.
Recommended Combinations
In this final section, we’ll show you a selection of motherboard and CPU combinations, which we’ve paired up to meet various needs and prices. If you’re not sure where to start, these example systems should give you an idea.
BUDGET CHOICE (Approx. £110)
Asus H81-PLUS and Intel Pentium G3258
Basically the cheapest ATX motherboard we could find with an Intel chipset was the Asus H81-PLUS, a Socket 1150 (Haswell) board available for around £55. It only has two DIMM slots, so if you’re planning to reuse memory, that could be a problem in terms of getting enough in the system, but that’s a very small problem. The lack of an HDMI-out port (it supports VGA only) is likely to be a bigger concern if you’re trying to build a modern system but, on the other hand, if you’re trying to avoid a monitor upgrade, it might be helpful to have the old connector available.
Although it’s low-end, it has support for PCIe, USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gbps, so most of the latest technologies are accounted for even at this low a level. It also has on-board gigabit LAN.
CPU-wise, this seems ideally suited to a Celeron or Pentium chip, mainly because there’s very little chance of it being used for multimedia. Although it’s not the fastest, we’d recommend the Intel Pentium G3258, which is a 3.2GHz dual-core Pentium costing around £55. Aside from some anniversary branding, it’s identical to the Pentium G3250, though, so if you can find that cheaper, go for it!
ALL-PURPOSE CHOICE (Approx. £180)
Gigabyte GA-H170-HD3 and Intel Core i3-6100
For an all-purpose home system, you want something that’ll happily accommodate a Skylake Core i3 chip, and probably the best choice that gets you all the features you want without getting expensive is the Gigabyte GA-H170-HD3. This £80 board has everything you’ll need for a competitive system, with four DIMM slots, a trio of PCIe slots and space for SATA, SATA express and M.2 storage. There are also eight USB 3.0 ports and support for HDMI-out, so there’s plenty of room to build a relatively high-end system around this.
In that sense, you don’t have to go for a cheaper CPU (this’ll take anything up to the fastest Core i7), but the lack of any overclocking functionality of multi-card graphics support means it’s best treated as the basis for a less powerful system. We recommend pairing it with a Core i3 – specifically, the Core i3-6100, which is clocked at 3.7GHz and costs just under £100. It’s a good £20 to £30 cheaper than other Core i3s, even though it’s virtually identical. It has 1MB less cache and just a 200MHz slower clock speed than the best Core i3, so it’s hardly a poor performer.
The only possible problem with this combo is that it runs on DDR3 RAM instead of DDR4, but that’s hardly a deal-breaker at this point, especially if you have DDR3 you can reuse. In a general use system, the older RAM isn’t going to be any kind of bottleneck.
HIGH-END CHOICE (Approx. £305)
Gigabyte GA-Z170-HD3P and Intel Core i5-6600K
If you’re building a high-end system, you need to pair it with a motherboard that can match it, and that’s why we’re looking at the Gigabyte GA-Z170-HD3P. Its Z170 chipset means it supports unlocked CPUs, and it’s a DDR4 board so you can take advantage of the latest in RAM speeds. Support for multiple graphics cards means there’s virtually no height the board cannot scale if you’re building a gaming system, and it supports the latest technologies like USB 3.1 and USB Type-C, which aren’t found on cheaper boards.
Priced at £102, it’s still well within the price range of a typical home system, and only hardcore gaming enthusiasts need worry about spending any more than that. We’d pair it with a Core i5-6600K, which is a £200 3.5GHz quad-core, but incredible value – especially if you ever want to overclock it. If you definitely won’t overclock, you can save £12 by getting the multiplier-locked version, but frankly that’s a waste of potential.
Price aside, we can’t see anything bad about this setup. It’s modern, powerful and it’ll last a long time. You’ll even be able to upgrade the CPU for a newer version further down the line without having to swap out the motherboard, and as far as we’re concerned, that longevity justifies the price.