Intel Core i3-8100 CPU Review

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AMD Ryzen are overpriced across the board and has been since launch day. The fact that you can get an 1800s for $300 (i.e. $330 - $30 discount with mobo) vs. launch day price of $500 means that Ryzen prices have dropped 40%. See:
http://www.microcenter.com/product/485483/Ryzen_7_1800X_36_GHz_8_Core_AM4_Boxed_Processor

If the Ryzen 3 are priced $80 it would be an easy sell. AMD needed to price correctly from the start.
 
I'm not sure I agree. That would mean AMD selling a 1200 for only about $20 more than an 860K, despite a huge uptick in performance. Moreover, the 1200 and its brethren use the same die as every other Ryzen. Can AMD afford to sell even defective (and thus limited to a 2x2 core arrangement) processors for as little as that?
 
I can't call this a generational leap, it's just two more cores, something Intel could have done a long time ago if it wanted to. It was forced to by AMD. Of course various results are going to be better with two more cores, but the wording often makes it sound like there's been some kind of amazing redesign. Fact is, the 8100 is just a derived, renamed and slowly evolved followon from the ancient i5 2500, over which for threaded tasks it's only a third faster (big whoop), and that's with a 200MHz advantage.

Btw, I found this useful reference page:

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000005647/processors.html

It has links to an equivalent page for i7s. Bound to be an i3 link somewhere.

 
Right now with spectre looming large, every single CPU out there that is supposed to deliver some level of performance has got to us speculative prefetch and execute, and spectre will make that unusable. Doesn't matter, intel, amd, arm, apple etc. there is nothing really worth buying until new hardware redesigns are out and anything you buy now, is due to be replaced in a couple of years when the redesign with the fixes are out.
 
The platform cost chart is once again very deceptive when you consider that this budget processor still requires an expensive Z-series motherboard, since lower-cost options aren't available yet. Sure, there will be lower cost motherboards to go with the CPU one day, but those still aren't available, and by the time they are, this price data is likely to be obsolete, and the next generation of Ryzen processors will be coming out. In fact, the pricing seems to be quite inaccurate already. The 8100 is currently selling for around $130 at major online stores, while the 1300X is just $120, the 1400 is $155, and the 1500X is $175.

And comparing the lowest cost overclocking-capable motherboards currently available for Ryzen and Coffee Lake, you're looking at around a $50 price difference, not just the $20 value arbitrarily selected for that comparison chart. That should place the i3-8100 alongside the 1500X in terms of total platform cost. And since the $200 i5-8400 was included, (again at an inaccurate price) along with the $170 8350K (which requires a cooler), it would have also made sense to include the $200 Ryzen 1600, which can cost significantly less than either of those options when platform costs are taken into account.

Either the cost comparison chart is purposefully deceptive, or this data was all gathered months ago at Coffee Lake's launch, and left sitting around to get stale for a few months until someone finished the writeup. Either way, it would probably be better to not include cost comparison charts at all if they're going to be grossly inaccurate. And of course, the lack of Spectre and Meltdown patches means the benchmarks are likely inaccurate as well, though I can understand that it will be some time before the performance impacts of those fully settle. Ideally, this review should have been released closer to the processor's launch though, when that wouldn't have been a known concern.

Also, it's probably worth pointing out that the dot colors are messed up in some of the cost comparison charts, and a stray blue dot seems to have fallen out of its nest and landed on the ground in one of them. : P
 
Let's see...

1. As hinted in the conclusion the test systems don't really represent what these CPUs can be expected to typically be paired with. In my mind a GTX 1050Ti graphics card for all tests and B350 motherboard for the Ryzens would provide more realistic results.

2. Such changes to the hardware should also influence the platform price/performance evaluation. As of today the Core i3 plus motherboard is ~$60 more expensive than the Ryzen 3 alternatives.

3. There are some unrelated data to be drawn from the test resuls as well: By comparing the difference in result from the two Ryzen 3 CPUs at 3.9GHz one can get a clue to the precision (or lack thereof) for each test. There should theoretically be no difference at all since both CPUs are internally identical and are tested on the same platform with the same settings and identical clock speeds.

The only real conclusion I can draw from this review is that once cheaper motherboards become available the Core i3-8100 will "rule" for a month or two until the Ryzen APUs appear (in April?).
 


One would hope. I don't know how many times friends call me about the Microsoft Malware Warnings received from compromised websites or advert groups asking me what to do.

I tell them its a scam and ignore those warnings. If they called already, I tell them hang up immediately. I also ask if the provided any personal or financial info, or downloaded and installed a piece of software the so-called techs told them to download and install so they could fix the problem. I also tell them that the software is so they can peruse your computer to steal what they can.

With this mentality, I'm almost afraid that they will get scammed into installing exploits.
 

It's included in one of the eight price comparison charts, and that chart also happens to have a stray blue dot and incorrect colors. Considering the 1600 wasn't included in the benchmark charts or mentioned anywhere, It seems more likely that it just got left in there when they were copying and pasting the chart data from one of their other Coffee Lake reviews. In any case, the pricing they have for it is wrong, since major online retailers are selling it for $200 now, not the $220 depicted in the chart.


Since this appears to be the exact same build they used for their i5 and i7 Coffee Lake reviews, I suspect they just tested these processors once, and are re-using the data between reviews. The numbers for the gaming results do appear to match between October's i5-8400 review and this one. They might have even benchmarked the 8100 months ago, when they were testing the other processors. So, testing with budget builds that better fit these lower-end processors would mean they would need to re-run a large number of benchmarks.


Yeah, that is an interesting point. Also, I just noticed that Tom's never did release their Ryzen 1200 review yet. I guess that makes this the Ryzen 1200 review as well. : P Maybe they were not able to achieve quite as high of an overclock on their 1200, but rounded the number to 3.9Ghz anyway. And perhaps they decided that the data didn't seem good enough to be used in a review for the 1200, which is why they didn't post one. For the most part, the results seem to be within 2% or so for the two processors, although in some tests they're quite a bit off, like the overclocked 1300X performing 6% faster in the Civ AI test, while the overclocked 1200 was over 6% faster in some of the Adobe tests, which seems rather anomalous. I can see why they wouldn't want to use this data for a 1200 review.


Supposedly, the Ryzen 2200G and 2400G are "shipping" February 12th, though I'm not sure if they'll be widely available right away. If the prices of graphics cards are still out of hand when they launch though, I imagine a number of gamers on limited budgets might look to them, considering how even lower-end GPU prices have been climbing lately. They should also make Ryzen a lot more compelling for those not interested in gaming, who might not want to spend money on a dedicated graphics card.
 

No amount of patching will save them from sabotaging themselves by being woefully ignorant and unsafe.
 
Until the less expensive boards come out, it is hard to recommend these. You can get a 1500x with a B350 pro4m for nearly the same price as an 8100 and the cheapest Z370 board. While straight up gaming the 1500x is not quite as fast as the 8100, in overall system performance, while gaming, I think the 1500x would have a bit of an edge on the 8100. The SMT should help with handling things running in the background, while gaming, like discord or whenever Windows, or AV, gets the itch to start an update download, ect.

Once the non Z boards start showing up, AMD is going to have to slash prices to compete, until they can release Ryzen 2.
 

Keep in mind that the i3-8100 was tested exclusively at DDR4 2400 while the OCed Ryzen 3 CPUs were at DDR4 3200. At the time of this post, the difference in price for an 8gb kit of DDR4 2400 vs. DDR4 3200 is ~$20. So if you subtract that from the $50 you are only talking a ~$30 price difference to their tested platform cost. They added $20 in the value comparison. Ten dollars might change the graph a little but not much.

While some of the benchmarks in this review show similar performance between the new i3 8100 and the Ryzen 3 CPUs, some of these benchies are absolute slam-dunk wins for the i3-8100. Strictly from a gaming standpoint, I think at this time the Ryzen 3 lineup needs a price reduction. It'll be interesting to see the new APUs, but even the 2400g will only have graphics similar to a GT 1030... that's great for a APU, but merely entry-level for gaming. I'm more interested in what Zen+ brings to the table in the new CPUs.
 
Still seems to me that the Ryzen 3 1200 is the most efficient choice at these price points.

The R31200 OC either matches the locked i3, surpasses it, or is beaten by the i3 by only an average of 3-4% (2-3 fps). Significantly, R31200, OC'ed, matched or even beat i5 7400 in several of the benches here.

Then you have the fact that the cpu is the clear bottleneck here: in real-world situations, a builder isn't going to pair either an i3 or an R3 with a GTX 1080; something in the tier of GTX 1060 is much, much more likely, which would narrow the differences in benches between the i3 and R3 even further.

The gorilla in the room remains the mobos: marketing the i3, locked or unlocked, as a "budget builder" choice in light of no budget mobos just doesn't make sense.

For the extra money of the i3, coupled with the extra cost of Z boards, a budget builder could go nearly to the next tier with AMD: R5 1600 is going for a flat $200 right now.

R3 1200 is as low as $96 currently, with a range of solid, B350 boards available at ~ $80 = $176, or $195 if they went with the 1300X. i3 plus a Z board is going to run ~ $240, so anywhere from $40-50 difference.

Why would someone spend $240 for an i3 8100 and a Z board, when for only $40 more ($280 total) they could get a Ryzen 5 1600 and a B350 board?

Then of course you have the upgrade path going through the rest of 2018 and into 2020 with the AMD parts, which should also weigh heavily in a budget builder's mind.
 


FWIW, these guys found a gaming performance decrease of 3-4% for the i3 after applying the two Meltdown/Spectre patches: https://www.techspot.com/article/1556-meltdown-and-spectre-cpu-performance-windows/page4.html

That (preliminary) result certainly isn't the end of the world (though the storage benchmarks are pretty shocking), but assuming that AMD isn't similarly affected, Ryzen will look a fair bit better in the comparison very soon.
 

You're leaving out the main thing that affects their graphs, that the prices are completely wrong, even if you ignore the platform cost discrepancies. These prices may have been closer to accurate around the time Coffee Lake launched three months ago, but they bear little resemblance to reality at the time of this review's publication.

Also, I'm not seeing that much of a price difference between most DDR4 2400 and 3200 sets. Looking at the current prices from Newegg, the cost of a dual channel 2x4GB kit of DDR4 2400 starts at around $91 at the bare minimum, while the cost of DDR4 3200 kits start around $106. The price differences are even less when comparing like products within some popular product lines, for example...

Team T-Force Vulcan
2400 = $100
2666 = $101
2800 = $103
3000 = $103
3200 = $106

G.SKILL Ripjaws V Series
2400 = $98
2666 = $104
2800 = $104
3000 = $107
3200 = $109

So, we're seeing only a $6 to $11 difference in these cases. As far as their current processor pricing goes, the i3-8100 is $131, and the Ryzen 1500X is $175, and there's also the 1400 for just $150, albeit with less cache and a less impressive stock cooler. The lowest priced overclocking capable motherboards start at around $60 for Ryzen, and $110 ($100 after rebate) for Coffee Lake. So the minimum cost for the CPU and Mobo together add up to $235 for the 1500X system, and $241 for the 8100 system, or $231 with the rebate. There are also some bundle deals that can bring the prices down further while also getting you a more comparable ATX motherboard on the AMD side, and they also work out to a similar $5 price difference after rebates.

There is that slightly higher memory cost to get the full capability out of Ryzen as well, but even figuring that in, the i3-8100 is clearly competing against the Ryzen 5 1400 and 1500X in terms of price, while the Ryzen 3 processors are still competing against dual-core Kaby Lakes. Once Coffee Lake motherboards with lower-cost chipsets come out, then sure, AMD will likely need to perform some price adjustments. Of course, the last I heard from a leaked roadmap late last year, those lower-end motherboards and processors from Intel might not be coming out until around the same time as AMD's 12nm Zen+ CPUs.
 


Hi,
Yes, I agree that we should simply check what is the best choice and just buy that. No brand biased.If the competition was fair...

BUT...my point is this:

If you wanted to buy some nice CPU (quad-core lets say), a year ago you had to give more than ~180USD, right?
Then AMD came with a new line of CPUs, they invested heavy money, suddenly you can buy cheaper and powerful quad-core.

So you have a CHOICE.

Intel sees that, makes a new product, (actually slaps i3 on i5 CPU), and they are back in the game. Now they could do that before, but you didn't have a choice, so they didn't care for you.

You are happy, you say Thank you AMD for investing money and bring great product.But I will still go for Intel and reward them with my money.

How many times can AMD do comeback's if people do not reward them for what they accomplished?

Cause once there is no AMD, you will have no CHOICE and the prices will go up.

So my point is, by buying certain products you vote for certain attitude toward you by this companies.
And if you buy from companies that do not really care that much about you, you are basically saying them that you are OK with that
Like:

Make new CPUs once a year with only 3-5% increase in performance, with another socket so I need to change everything, expensive motherboards first of course.

Ruther than telling:
Hey, I am not OK with you artificially slowing advance in CPUs and changing socket type for no real reason just so that you can milk more money from me.

You see my point?



 

The ~5%/year thing is simply due to Intel being pretty much at the limit of the per-thread performance that can be extracted from typical code. There is very little any company can do about it until software developers manage to become more effective and efficient at writing more heavily threaded code to leverage extra cores/threads. AMD will be in the exact same boat once they'll be done sorting out the performance speed bumps in their Zen architecture and finish closing the gap with Intel.

Same goes for any ISA. There is only so much per-thread performance that can be extracted from typical instruction flows before extracting any more performance becomes impractical due to rapidly increasing complexity (die area, power, timing margins, design and validation effort, etc.) for rapidly diminishing gains.
 
1) You dared to say that AMD can't compete on price when they have a much cheaper fabrication process with higher yields?

2) You don't mention Meltdown or the fact that this processor will be slowed down up to 39% due to an architectural CPU flaw.

3) you state that on paper it's the same as Kaby-lake (WHY WATER IT DOWN???) Why not just state that the largest difference between the two processors is factory over-clocking?

4) What would be worthwhile is a comparison of what you'd get from a similar corei5 or Corei7 Kaby-lake CPU if it was MANUALLY overclocked. That would be worth something.

You're not required to spin this processor one way or the other, so why are you spinning it at all? Is your loyalty not to your readers? It doesn't feel like it, feels to me like your loyalty is to Intel.

if you're going to introduce a CPU, then introduce it along with it's flaws. That's what unbiased reporting is.

I don't see how you can release an article like this, without pertinent information about Meltdown and it's effects. This is a downright misleading article.

What about AMT, ME bugs? What about on-going security weakness because these CPU's are built off of 30 year old architecture? What about comments to future-proofing of this tech based on the Ryzen announcements.

You state that this CPU is somehow cheaper and better on price/performance when there's no upgrade path. (If you go Ryzen you can get another Ryzen to replace it in 2020).

This is a cherry-picked article meant to sell a CPU by ignoring all of the problems that Intel CPU's currently face.

It's misleading which makes this a horrible article.

Most people still don't understand that there is a Spectre of Meltdown bug. Most people have not run Windows update. Yet there's absolutely no mention of ongoing security issues that Intel CPU's face.

Would you recommend this CPU to your grandmother? I mean she probably doesn't know to run windows update or to read IT tech sites about security vulnerabilities in her computer. But she'll use that computer for banking investing and everything else.

Security trumps speed, it trumps everything related to a CPU, and you just went and ignored it.
 


I said AMD might not be able to get more aggressive with pricing on the price-comparable models because of the fixed manufacturing cost of the eight-core package. AMD did recently lower MSRP's for the Ryzen lineup (after this article was written), but it did not lower the 1400 and 1300X.

This article was in the pipeline before we learned of Meltdown and Spectre.

On paper this processor is similar to the Kaby Lake i5, but it is an i3. At i3 pricing.

The largest difference between the processors is not factory overclocking. It is two more cores. The previous-gen model had fewer cores.

I don't think that overclocking a more expensive K-series i5 or i7 processor for comparison would make much sense beyond an academic exercise. This is a less-expensive Core i3. We do have the Core i5-7400 in the results, which is a locked quad-core Kaby model. We also have the Core i5-8400.
 

There's so much wrong with your post that it's hard to know where to begin.

An i3 isn't going to see a 39% performance reduction due to Spectre and Meltdown - that percentage refers to enterprise-class CPUs used in certain worst-case workloads that typical users don't run. Less powerful CPUs like an i3 running typical workloads won't see that large of a performance difference. As Paul stated earlier, they are working on a piece to illustrate the effects of the patches. Try reading the comments section before posting.

Coffee Lake i3 CPUs have two more physical cores than Kaby Lake i3 CPUs... not the same - big difference there.

Why would you compare this CPU to a k-series i5 or i7? They are in a totally different price and performance class.

While AMD has a better upgrade path into 2020, you can still drop up to a i7-8700k into these motherboards which would be a huge upgrade over an i3. If this was a i7-8700k review then I would agree that there is no upgrade path.

AMD is also susceptible to both variants of Spectre. Your spiel about security and windows update is complete nonsense. The VAST majority of systems featuring an i3-8100 will be running Windows 10 Home. Win 10 home automatically updates itself. A non-techy Grandmother or any other non-techy is going to receive Win 10 updates whether they want them or not. The user doesn't need to initiate the update process. Don't you already know this?

EDIT: As far as the micro-code updates go, both Intel systems and AMD systems need microcode updates for Spectre - if Grandma wants to be secure, she'll need your help 😉
 
Gaming isn't everything, so a price change based on that seems very unlikely.

One should also expect more or less reduction in performance based on "the silicon lottery" when Coffee Lake CPUs get paired with budget motherboards that are more strict to enforce the TDP limit. Testing on high end "overclockers" Z370 boards just don't do these CPU justice. At the very worst (for some individual CPUs) the all core boost speed might only reach marginally above the base clock speed. (Admittedly it's mainly the single core boost that matters for gaming though.)

The new APUs will be interesting. Initial rumours do suggest the raw CPU power isn't that good though. If that's true the consumer will have a choice: CPU (Intel) or graphics (AMD)?
 

They already dropped the price of the Ryzen 3 1200 right after this review came out... And the i3-8100 doesn't have turbo boost as Paul explained in the first page of the article. I too am very curious about the CPU performance of the new APUs. Again from a gaming perspective, the $99 2200g will be hugely popular if its CPU-side performs on par with Ryzen 3 paired with discrete graphics. I get the feeling though that the lower-end Zen+ CPUs (Ryzen 3+ or whatever they call them) will also be very price competitive so we'll just have to wait and see.
 
Guess what it hasn't even been three months, and we have the 1600 at $150 with $30 mobo discount and another $20 rebate from AMD. Effectively $100 for the 1600. See:

Uh8fesd.jpg


https://www.amdpromos.com/index.php?s_id=&u_id=claim_entry

AMD was overpricing from the get go.

 

An in-store only, one-per household promotion at a single store chain with only 25 locations is not at all representative of general pricing. It's also likely that they are taking a loss on these sales, expecting most people buying them to also pick up all the other components for a new system to make up for it. Also, checking that page now shows it to be $150 only after the $20 rebate. They likely want to move out stock of the older CPUs and motherboards in anticipation for the 2nd-generation Ryzen processors coming out next month.

Also, "it hasn't even been three months" for what? The Ryzen 1600 came out almost a year ago. And the i3-8100 that this review is about came out over five months ago.
 
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