Intel Core i5 4570 4-core LGA 1150

A 2013 quad-core that still punches above its weight for everyday tasks. Grab one for under USD 50 and your old LGA 1150 board gets a new lease on life.

Four cores, four threads, 3.2GHz base with a 3.6GHz boost, and 6MB of L3 cache. The PassMark scores tell the story: 5224 multi and 2025 single. That single-core number is actually the star here, it lands right around the middle of the pack in our database, which means snappy everyday responsiveness. Multi-threaded workloads are where this chip shows its age, sitting in the bottom 40% of everything we've tested. But for a chip you can grab for pocket change, the fact that it still feels quick in Windows and handles older games fine is genuinely impressive. The 84W TDP also means it sips power compared to the space heaters Intel sells today.

The obvious modern alternative is the AMD Ryzen 5 5500, which absolutely demolishes this chip in multi-threaded workloads and sips even less power. But that's a different socket, different RAM, different everything. If you're already on LGA 1150, the i5-4570 is the sensible upgrade from an i3 or Pentium of the same era. The Dell Xeon E5-2637 V2 is an interesting wildcard, it's a server chip with similar single-core performance but way more cache, though you'll need a server board to run it. For most people on a dead platform, the i5-4570 is the path of least resistance.

Here's where it gets interesting. US listings range from USD 30 to USD 131, which is a wild spread for a chip this old. The CAD market is tighter at CAD 77 to CAD 135. If you're paying more than USD 50 for this thing, you're getting ripped off. The sweet spot is the USD 30-40 range on Amazon Renewed, where you get a tested chip with a guarantee. At that price, it's an absolute steal for reviving an old office PC or building a budget emulation box.

The Intel Core i5-4570 is a Haswell-era quad-core that refuses to die. It's a 22nm chip from 2013 that still handles everyday computing and light gaming without breaking a sweat, and the used market is absolutely flooded with them. The one thing to know: this is a budget king for old LGA 1150 boards, not a performance upgrade for anyone on anything modern.

If you're building a new PC from scratch, this isn't it. Go get a Ryzen 5 5500 or an Intel i3-12100F instead, you'll get dramatically better performance and a real upgrade path. This chip is for people resurrecting old hardware, not starting fresh.

If you've got an old LGA 1150 board sitting around and you want to squeeze a few more years out of it, the i5-4570 is a no-brainer at the right price. It's not a chip for new builds, it's not a chip for heavy multitasking, and it's definitely not a chip for modern AAA gaming. But as a cheap drop-in upgrade that makes an old PC feel alive again, it's hard to beat. Just don't pay more than USD 50.