The Best Sub-£100 CPU

Intel Core i3-2100

Manufacturer: Intel
UK price (as reviewed): £94.99 (inc VAT)
US price (as reviewed): $124.99 (ex tax)

Intel Core i3-2105

Manufacturer: Intel
UK price (as reviewed): £102.12 (inc VAT)
US price (as reviewed): $134.99 (ex tax)

The Core i3-2100 and 2105 each have a pair of identical 3.1GHz Sandy Bridge cores, and both are rated at a TDP of 65W. As with the other Intel CPUs on test, they boast a 3MB pool of shared L3 cache, along with a pair of 256KB L2 cache pools (one for each core) and a pair of dedicated 64KB pools of L1 cache (again, one per core).

However, the main advantage offered by the i3-2100 and i3-2105 is Hyper-Threading. They generate two logical cores from their pair of physical cores, with four cores appearing in the operating system. In theory, this should give them a boost in multithreaded tasks, although it’s less efficient than having four physical cores, as with the Phenom II X4 955 BE and the A-series APUs.

The on-board GPU is the only difference between the CPUs – the cheaper i3-2100 carries Intel’s HD Graphics 2000 GPU while the i3-2105 is equipped with an HD Graphics 3000 GPU. The HD 3000 variant has double the number of cores – or EUs, as Intel calls them – of the 2000 version (12 as opposed to six). This made no difference in our 2D benchmarks, meaning that the two processors performed identically in WPrime, Cinebench 11.5 and our Media Benchmarks.

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As you’d expect given their price, the two Core-i3s were never far from the top of the table, both posting an overall score of 1,488 in our Media Benchmarks. Only the heavily overclocked Phenom II X4 955BE was able to beat them, but it drew more than twice as much power from the wall, forcing our test system to draw 400W at full load, compared to just 177W with a Core i3 installed.

Gaming performance without a discrete GPU was dire, but coupled with a graphics card, they rocketed up the results table. A drop-off in performance occurred at the higher of our two game-test resolutions, where CPUs with four physical cores had an advantage, but the two CPUs still managed playable frame rates. In 2D applications, the Core i3s are the best processors in this Labs test.

They’re also very power-efficient, but the waters become muddied when you throw 3D performance into the mix, as their on-board GPUs are meagre. This means that you’ll need to buy a discrete GPU for gaming on a Core-i3 system – an added cost, which makes the AMD A8-3850 a more tempting purchase.

Specifications

• Frequency 3.1GHz
  
• Core Sandy Bridge
  
• GPU Intel HD Graphics 2000 (i3-2100) Intel HD Graphics 3000 (i3-2105)
  
• Number of cores 2 x physical, 2 x logical
  
• Cache L1: 2 x 64KB, L2: 2 x 256KB, L2:3MB
  
• Packaging LGA1155
  
• Thermal design power (TDP) 65W