For gaming, the Core i3 2120. It has better performance in most titles (most games don't use more than 2-3 cores anyway, including Skyrim, Starcraft 2, Crysis, SWTOR and Battlefield 3). It also puts you on a more powerful platform, since you can upgrade to a Core i5 later, which smokes anything from AMD.
For movie editing or 3D design work, the Phenom II X4 965 would be better because in those tasks having 4 physical cores does help.
Here's the head-to-head between the Core i3 2100 and Phenom II X4 965:
The amd phenom ll x4 965 quad , not only it's a quad core processor but the architecture of the processor is built for gaming more than multi-tasking, the i3 2120 is good for multi tasking , also we found out that this amd processor and above is the cheapest can use for good gaming
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For gaming, the Core i3 2120. It has better performance in most titles (most games don't use more than 2-3 cores anyway, including Skyrim, Starcraft 2, Crysis, SWTOR and Battlefield 3). It also puts you on a more powerful platform, since you can upgrade to a Core i5 later, which smokes anything from AMD.
For movie editing or 3D design work, the Phenom II X4 965 would be better because in those tasks having 4 physical cores does help.
Here's the head-to-head between the Core i3 2100 and Phenom II X4 965:
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/289?vs=102
Keep in mind the 2120 is slightly better than the 2100 shown above.
Definately Phenom II X4 965, as the first post said, it's build more for gaming.
The amd phenom ll x4 965 quad , not only it's a quad core processor but the architecture of the processor is built for gaming more than multi-tasking, the i3 2120 is good for multi tasking , also we found out that this amd processor and above is the cheapest can use for good gaming
even if phenom are faster than i3 2120...
but u can upgrade to 2nd gen i5 and i7 in future.
which is unbeatable...