Intel's Pentium Gold G5600 processor features HyperThreading, which turns its two cores into four threads. The result is one of the most affordable entry-level CPUs that's fit for gaming. Tough competition comes in form of the AMD Ryzen 2200G, which is similarly priced, but offers four real cores.

We got our hands on the new Pentium Gold G5600 dual-core processor based on the "Coffee Lake" architecture and designed for the Intel 300-series chipset platform. There was a time when the Pentium brand denoted the very best in client computing. Since the advent of the Core brand of multi-core processors, Intel brands from the previous millennium, such as Pentium and Celeron, were relegated to the entry-level segments. The fastest Pentium couldn't match the performance of the slowest Core 2 Duo, so this product stack change made sense. AMD did something similar with its Athlon brand. Over the years, Intel's entry-level client processor lineup swelled, and stratified.