Inexpensive but good CPU?

you cant really have both....you must either choose inexpensive or good.

Define inexpensive & name your motherboard

Get FX 6300 or 8320.

FX-6300, great one. 88€ - 95 Watt

FX-6350, great one. 105€ - 125 Watt

FX-8320, another great one. 119€ - 125 Watt

If you want the best for the price get FX6300, but if you want a little better but little more expensive with more power consumption, get FX8320, not the FX6350 imo because the FX8320 gives more performance consuming same. With that GTX 660 I would personally get the FX6300.

I have a FX 8320 oc'd to be the same as 8350 and its pretty good. Like everyone above, get either 63XX or 8320.

even an Intel I3 would keep up with that GPU

anyhow your only option if you want to stick with AMD will be the FX 6300 and it is not worth the 6350 you could over clock the 6300 slightly and get the same speed and really the bump in clock speed you will not notice on the 6350 plus it is a 125 watt cpu so if your board does not support 125 watt it will not work

on the other hand the fan that comes with the 6300 will work but it can get a bit loud under load at least i think so you may want to also add a CM Hyper 212 after market cooler it will run quiet and keep it cool all of that should not set you back more then 150 U.S if you get it on like Amazon which due to free return shipping in case of issues far beats any deal Newegg could muster unless they have a big sale on the cpu

do not get the FX 4100 though if you want to save a few bucks you could get the 4300 which is the same as the 6300 minus 2 cores s FX 6300 is 118 on Amazon
FX 4300 is 101 on Amazon
Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo 29.99 on Amazon

though the after market cooler is optional i still think it is a good choice i am glad i got mine it runs cooler and runs damn near silent

around 140 for both the cpu and cooler plus free shipping if you can get it on amazon and you will still be under budget and you can ebay your old cpu someone will buy it if you price it right

anyhow i hope i have helped

i see some saying the 8320 bad choice not worth the extra cost it is only a 8 core vs 6 core and unless your going to do serious video editing or along those lines it is a waste at least on the gaming end as the single core performance is not that great so unless it is really optimized for 8core 100% imo it is a waste of money and futher more it is 125 cpu

I can recomend you Intel Pentium G3258 with Z97 motherboard (something like AS Rock Z97 Anniversary). You can overclock this processor so it will give you enough power for gaming. (for overclock it will be better if you will go for better CPU cooler too.) ;) and it will be still very cheap :)

Even with all the hype the G3258 Pentium has made, which is absolutely well deserved, a 760K Athlon II would serve a user better (inb4 bogus benchmarks that show otherwise , and yeah I also mean showing benches on games that don't even use more than 2 cores).

A 760K is more than OK for the price, even tho this may not mean anything on the internet, but I say it from experience it's a OK CPU.

LE: To complete my thought on the G3258, to me this is more of a novelty part, something one would put in a way more expensive build than a dual core deserves with good water cooling only so we could hit the high 4.something GHZ to marvel at a dual core performance, but even so we must admit that most of it's hype is that Intel has decided to go for an unlocked low cost CPU, thing that happened since the dawn of time for cheap CPU's on the red side of the barricade .

Also, I'm not a preacher and I'm also not a fanboy , I can see pros and cons in each of them but one must also be reasonable. For example everyone who would pay more than 200 bucks on a CPU should definitely go on the blue team.

Why wouldn't you give us specs? It's not like we can trace your computer with that or anything, you need to make sure you have a good power supply, pre builts are known for having cheap and bad quality ones. Also you say that you bought a pre built because you didn't know about computers, but you don't know that intel and amd cpu's have different sockets?

As for the question, a fx 6350 should do the job.

i5-4440, dump AMD.

I dont want to start another Intel vs AMD debate, but i ditched Phenom II 965 this year for Intel (i5-4690) and my god, Intel is just light years ahead.

There are certain games (cpu heavy) where you'll always have bottleneck with pretty much every AMD CPU. (shitty core-core performance.)

FX 6300, economical, and still a very highly rated processor. I have a buddy who has a 6300 with a GTX 660 (2 GB Ti) and it's a beast.

Define inexpensive. I would personally recommend the Intel Core i5-4690K for $240, or the Intel Core i5-4590 for $200. If you are really on a budget then I recommend the Intel Core i3-4130 for $120, but I cannot in good conscience recommend anything cheaper.

if you overclock: recent reviews show the pentium anniversary overclocks like crazy, you should check if/when is available, and how much it costs+the motherboard

if not, a i3 or amd fx6300 like mentioned earlier seems a fine choice

FX6300 or FX8320, if you have the motherboard for them...