Intel Core i3-12100

A lowly quad-core serves up big performance gains, finds Paul Alcorn.

- Paul Alcorn

SPECS

Socket: Socket V LGA1700

Process: Intel 7 10nm

Cores (P+E): 4+0

Threads: Eight

P-cache: 5MB L2, 12MB L3

P-core: 3.3GHz (4.4GHz boost)

Unlocked: No

GPU: UHD Graphics 730, 24 EU, 300MHz, OpenGL 4.5, OpenCL 2.1

Mem max: 128GB, No ECC, two-channel

Mem speed: DDR5 4800MT/s, DDR4 3200MT/s

PCle: v5 16-lanes, v4 four-lanes Peak Base

Power: 60W

Max. Turbo

Power: 89W

Intel’s four-core eight-thread Core i3-12100 comes with a highly competitive £129 price tag that easily helps us brand this as the best budget CPU of 2022 so far. Not to mention that the chip also comes in the option of a £99 F-series with deactivated graphics. Ever since AMD’s Ryzen 3300X arrived in 2020 the sub-£200 processor market has been left lackluster at best. AMD’s cheapest Zen-3 CPU is the £230 Ryzen 5600G and at almost twice the price certainly struggles to fend off this Intel pocket rocket.