Intel Core i3-12100 and i5-12400 review: fast, affordable and hard to fault

It was not a good time to build a computer on a budget. Some of that is due to lingering delivery issues and a particularly annoying GPU shortfall (albeit perhaps one) very gradually relaxation). And part of that is because the products on offer haven’t improved much lately – Intel’s best budget and midrange processors were stuck with an outdated architecture due to manufacturing issues, and AMD chose to focus on high-end products instead. .

In anticipation of AMD’s new processors under $200, today we take a look at some of Intel’s best processors under $200 in years. The Core i5-12400 ($210 with a GPU, $180-ish without one) is a six-core processor that offers great performance for budget-minded gaming PCs and anyone who wants to do light photo and video editing work without spending tons of money. And the Core i3-12100 (about $150 with a GPU or $120 without) is a quad-core chip that can handle games when paired with a GPU, but is ideally suited for browsing, office and school work, video calls, and all that. others you need. maybe you want from a basic desktop into a home office setup.

Performance and energy efficiency

We mainly compare the Core i3-12100 and Core i5-12400 with their direct predecessors: the Core i3-10100, the Core i5-10400 and the Core i5-11400. We’ve also added the Ryzen 5 3600 as a point of comparison, which used to sell for $200 but hasn’t been widely available at that price for a while; comparisons to the newer Ryzen 5 5500 and 5600 CPUs will follow after those chips are released.

Some details about our test systems:

We chose to use a B660-based DDR4 motherboard to run all of our testing on these CPUs because it’s the kind of board you’d be pairing these chips with if you were actually building a budget PC. you could be always opt to put a Core i3 or i5 chip in an expensive Z690 motherboard with DDR5 RAM, but you’d be paying a lot more money for little to no return on that investment. For consistency, all CPUs were also paired with a Vetroo V5 CPU Fan, a budget air cooler that’s a step up from the in-box fan that comes with these CPUs.

Alder Lake’s single-core performance is impressive no matter which of these CPUs you buy; the new chips easily outperform their 10th and 11th generation counterparts and the Ryzen 5 3600. That’s important to keep overall performance (and most games) running smoothly.

As for multicore performance, note that the quad-core Core i3-12100 beats or comes close to the six-core Core i5-10400 in our Cinebench and Handbrake tests – there are fewer cores, but they are much faster . The Core i5-12400 also handily beats the previous generation Intel CPUs and the Ryzen 5 3600 in these tests. But if you’re doing a lot of CPU-bound rendering or video editing, keep in mind that there’s a significant gap between the i5-12400 and the i7-12700, especially when you increase the i7’s power limits. Two extra P-cores and four E-cores make it much more capable if you use all those cores at the same time.

When comparing power efficiency, it’s worth noting that using Intel’s default power settings, the full system power consumption in our Handbrake Coding Test is not Which otherwise when using one of these processors. That means whichever system can get the job done the fastest is usually the most efficient. The only time that curve is distorted is when you increase the power limits of the more expensive processors, which gets the job done quickly at the expense of efficiency.

You’ll also notice, as we did in our Mac Studio review, the relative inefficiency of Intel’s midrange CPUs compared to Apple’s M1 chips. Intel’s CPUs are fast (the M1 traded blows with the Core i3 in our testing), but Apple’s chips use much less power. Admittedly, if you’re buying a PC primarily to play games, it doesn’t matter how good the M1 is, because it can’t run Windows or the games that Windows need. But it’s worth keeping the equation in mind when considering Intel’s overall market position and Apple’s recent loss as a customer.