Intel Xeon E3-1220 Processor 3.1 GHz 8 MB Cache Socket LGA1155

I paid $55 roughly for mine. It runs everything from Hunt: Showdown to Battlefield 1 with 16gb DDR3 and a 1050 times. It's the same as an i5 but it has igpu disabled. When it comes to good budget CPUs, used Xeons are the master race.

I assembled a couple of pc's for computational works. Core i5-2500, Xeon E3-1220 and Xeon E3-1230. The performances have been very close. Xeon costs more in the RAM (with ECC). But it also works with non-ECC RAM.Compared with a laptop with i3-330M, E3-1220 is around 3 times faster under single core, and 6 times faster under multi-core (running MATLAB).The price is much lower than i7-2600, with HT technology cut.