KitGuru Annual Awards 2013

If you are reading these awards in page order, then our choice for Budget processor will be no surprise.

In a world where IDC reports that the bast majority of systems being sold will cost less than £600, then most people will not allocate more than one third of their budget to processor and mainboard technologies. Splitting the available 50:50, we're looking for a processor that hits a maximum of just over £100.

In this price region, Intel offers products like the Core i3-3225 which is a dual core processor (4 threads) that has no overclocking capability and ships at just 3.3GHz. It does have Intel HD4000 graphics, but the in-game performance is nothing to get excited about.

How does AMD's APU range line up with the low end Intel products?

In lots of game tests, the graphics on a high end AMD APU will be over 50% faster than a similarly priced Intel HD4000 system – and that's before you optimise the memory configuration or overclock the AMD chip.

If you're looking at video rendering, then you'll need to boost your budget and buy an Intel chip costing twice as much, but if you're seriously working to a budget then the AMD 6800k gets our vote. You can always add a discrete graphics card later if you find the need for better frame rates and image quality.

Read our review, over here.

KitGuru's choice for Best Value Processor 2013 goes to the AMD 6800K APU.

Buy from Overclockers UK, from this link.

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