A shortage of Intel’s popular Pentium G4560 CPU is leading people to wonder whether stock of the Kaby Lake chip is being intentionally limited to drive customers to the more expensive Core i3-7100.
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A report by Digiworthy claims ‘Intel is said to be creating an artificial shortage of the G4560’ to drive the price up, making the higher-specced Core i3-7100 seem more appealing to customers than it currently does.
There wasn’t much of a contest until the Pentium chip’s recent price hike to around $83. Initially priced around the $64 mark, the G4560 was just a little over half the price of the Core i3. Bad news for the i3, as the base frequency of the G4560 is only 0.4GHz slower, and they sport the same number of cores and threads. Sure, the Pentium option is sporting HD Graphics 610, as opposed to the Core i3’s 630, but none of these specs made gamers want to shell out double the money for a slightly better chip.
It’s worth mentioning that this is all speculation at this point – Digiworthy’s article points to Hardware.fr’s observation that supply for the Pentium G4560 has been short in France and is predicted to be short throughout the summer, an article that also speculates at a possible intentional limiting of stock of the chip. Neither Digiworthy nor Hardware.fr have appeared to mention their sources at this point.
Either way, the accompanying price hike has certainly raised eyebrows. Would this sway you to get a Core i3 chip, or is the G4560 still the top dog of Intel’s budget chips?