Intel Core i3-4130 (Haswell) Review

Intel Core i3-4130 Review

Manufacturer: Intel
UK price (as reviewed): £89 (inc VAT)
US price (as reviewed): $130 (ex tax)

We've usually had easy access to Intel's Core i3 and Pentium ranges of CPUs but the chip giant is being surprisingly tight lipped about these latest additions to its line-up of fourth-generation Haswell-based CPUs.

They've also hit etailers shelves some time after the launch of the upper echelon CPUs such as the Core i5-4670K and Core i7-4770K that were released much earlier this year.

One possible reason for this is that even second-generation Sandy Bridge-based Core-i3 CPUs are still readily available and for roughly the same price. The same is true for super-cheap LGA1155 motherboards to go with them.

A surplus that might need to be shifted or not, the fact is that LGA1150 motherboards are just as cheap, retailing for less than £40 if you look at H81 and B85 chipset-based models. Given the better socket life expectancy of LGA1150 plus a newer generation CPU, if you're in the market for a cheap Intel system then opting for anything other than LGA1150 is probably unwise.

However, before we unequivocally recommend the CPU we're looking at here, we best take a closer look at it. The Core i3-4130 costs around £90 - pretty much the same as its Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge cousins still floating around, such as the Core i3-3220.

It also sports a similar clock speed - 3.4GHz, which is the same as the previous-generation Core i3-3240, with both CPUs lacking Turbo Boost but sporting Hyper-Threading, giving two logical cores in addition to the two physical ones. They have identical cache amounts too, with 3MB L3 cache.

Power consumption hasn't changed much either, mainly due to the fact that both Ivy Bridge and Haswell Core i3 CPUs are based on 22nm technology, with just the differences in architecture accounting for a 1W decrease from 55W to 54W for the non-low power models.

However, as a portion of the voltage regulation has been transferred to the CPU in fourth-generation CPUs, the difference might otherwise be more noticeable given that Haswell's main trump card has always been lower power consumption.

Intel's HD Graphics sees perhaps the biggest upgrade, moving to HD 4400 with the Core i3-4130. The GPU is also able to downclock further than it's predecessors, all the way to just 350MHz, as opposed to 650MHz for the Core i3-3240 - all while also boosting 100MHz higher to 1.15GHz. The rest of the specification is more or less the same but if you want to read more on Haswell, see our initial launch coverage here.


Specifications

• Frequency 3.4GHz
  
• Core Haswell
  
• Manufacturing process 22nm
  
• Number of cores 2 physical, 2 virtual
  
• Cache L1: 4 x 32KB, L2 2 x 256KB, L3 3MB (shared)
  
• Memory controller Dual-channel DDR3, up to 1,600MHz
  
• Packaging LGA1150
  
• Thermal design power (TDP) 54W
  
• GPU Intel HD 4400
  
• Features Hyper-Threading, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE4, SSE4.2, EM64T, F16C, Quick Sync Video