PC Gamer Presents - PC Hardware Handbook - May 2018

INTEL CORE i3-8100

http://www.intel.com £105

With Intel’s first foray into its Coffee Lake architecture, we saw one major difference from

its seventh series processors: core count. Each part received two extra cores.

The Core i3-8100 is the cream of the crop from that

redesign. It goes up from last gen’s two-core,

four-thread design to a flat four cores and no

hyperthreading. It’s a £105 Core i5 from last gen,

with a 3.6GHz clock count and integrated graphics,

making it versatile both for gaming and for those

looking to build a cheap and cheerful HTPC too.

In CineBench, we saw scores of 156 on the

single core, and just shy of 600 on the

multithreaded scenario. To put that into

context, a Sky Lake Core i5-6600K, scores

166 and 598. In games, we saw similar

performance, with 76fps in Far Cry Primal at 1440p

with a GTX 1080 versus the Core i7-8700K’s 77fps,

and 42fps in To t a l Wa r : At t i l a against the 8700K’s

43fps. If gaming is your focus, the Core i3-8100 is a

great option. The only downside compared to those

older Core i5s? No overclocking capability, and no

turbo. Honestly, that’s a small price to pay.

BASE CLOCK: 3.6GHZ / CORES/THREADS: 4/4 / LITHOGRAPHY: 14NM /

CACHE: 6MB / MEMORY SUPPORT: 64GB DDR4 @ 2666 MHZ /

MAX PCIE LANES: 16

CPU

1

POWER DRAW

Combine the

i3-8100 with a GTX 1080,

and 16GB of DDR4, and

you’ll be fine with a

550W PSU running it.

2

WOT NO

OVERCLOCK?

Some mobos may let you

overclock this, but Intel

doesn’t let you bump up

its budget parts.

3

4K STREAMING

Thanks to support

for HDCP 2.2 you’ll

finally be able to have

access to those 4K

streams without worry.

4

AMD

COMPETITION

The closest red rival for

single core performance

is AMD’s Ryzen 5 1500X,

coming in at £143.^90

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