For a pure mining system, a low-wattage Celeron or G-series Pentium should be plenty.
I read somewhere that Skein doesn't like the low end processors. Is that true?
Well here is the deal. I did a very basic newbie thread so I did not explain some choices in parts.
My go to cpu is this one the i5 6400t used on ebay
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-Core-i5-6400T-Quad-Core-2-20GHz-1MB-6MB-Socket-1151-Skylake-S-CPU-SR2L1-/152607562406?this one is 130 I wait for an ebucks promo of 8% or 10% off and buy them for about 117 usd
if lucky as low as 108 after ebucks. They work fine in z170 or z270 mobos.
I feel that this is a better choice for me and I will run them on xmr coins this allows me to earn about 75 cents a day extra. I will up date this thread with the xmr cpu mining info in the next few days.
I think a big farm with 30 or 4 rigs may not wan the better cpu but a guy like me with 4-8 rigs in my garage should look into used i5 6400t cpus. the t means it is a power saver. so even if you don't mine cpu coins you still save some coin in power.