The Intel Core i3-4160 is a dual-core four threaded 4th generation (Haswell) processor. It was released in Q3 2014 and scores a respectable 91 for effective speed. With its base frequency of 3.6 GHz, the 4160 is fast enough to run the vast majority of applications smoothly and it’s very reasonably priced for its performance which make it a sensible choice even when considering building a gaming PC. Although the integrated Intel HD Graphics 4400 are absolutely fine for general desktop use such as web browsing and word processing they may bottleneck a gaming machine. A 20% price premium would buy the slightly older i3-4350 which has a 33% larger (4MB) cache but its only about 1% faster (full comparison here). Overall the i3-4160 represents the best value for money I have seen outside Intel's Pentium and Celeron range of CPUs. [Nov '14 CPUPro]