Intel Core i3-14100

[Dr. Dro]

Just for the chips alone you're probably right, prices vary region to region so you could get it much cheaper a few months down the line. But "platform costs" are cheaper & have been for AMD for a good 1.5~2 decades now, possibly including the LGA 775 era!

A midrange DDR5 kit still costs anywhere from 50-100% more than equivalent DDR4 kit, and there are no A620 motherboards worth buying below $100. Not that with A620 being largely limited to PCIe 3.0 is a good idea to pair with the 8500G, its PCIe bandwidth is so badly gimped that you simply cannot do what you can with this Core i3 - cheap CPU that's "okay" for gaming but will drive any GPU correctly.

Chinese motherboards for socket AM5 are simply disgusting, as you can see here:

My primary bone with the 8500G is its exceptionally high price for what's on tap. Factor in that you're spending at least $130 US on a motherboard - generally, $170ish for a basic B650 micro-ATX from a reputable brand that will support at a minimum, a 4.0 graphics slot that will counterbalance the x4 link width restriction a little... and I just see no reason whatsoever why anyone building a gaming PC on a budget should choose an 8500G over the i3-14100(F), 13100 or even 12100 (since they`re the same CPU anyway).

The 12100F can be found exceptionally cheap already ($60 on AliExpress - since we're talking very low budget chips, this kind of marketplace search is acceptable IMO)

AMD could perhaps even have gotten away with $160 for that thing if they released it alongside an AM1 successor and heavily marketed it towards the same niche (budget desktop, home server, IoT controller), given its iGPU - it might be the latest RDNA 3 revision, but it's Vega levels of suck when it comes to performance - it's just not adequate for socket AM5 IMHO. The argument that you can upgrade to a Raphael or Granite Ridge CPU in the future, while valid, is very hard to justify in this specific segment, since the 7500F, 7600 are vastly superior choices which do not share this chip's limitations.

 

[R0H1T]

But DDR5 is not equivalent to DDR4, now I know I'm on DDR4 myself but if you're starting anew then DDR5 is probably the best way to go now. They're faster, more efficient & surely more "future proof" though MB's are definitely more expensive than they need to be ~ so buy them during the holiday/year end sales!

A midrange DDR5 kit still costs anywhere from 50-100% more than equivalent DDR4 kit,

You don't need a kit to run them at normal XMP/EXPO speeds. I bought 4x16 Adata RAM (not a kit) & they work just fine with two different chips.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Does this get a 2 year warranty boost as well?

Alder Lake is rock solid. But according to Intel's statements, they are going to give you 5yrs anyways -

Intel Two-Year Warranty Extension Statement​

Intel is committed to making sure all customers who have or are currently experiencing instability symptoms on their 13th and/or 14th Gen desktop processors are supported in the exchange process. We stand behind our products, and in the coming days we will be sharing more details on two-year extended warranty support for our boxed Intel Core 13th and 14th Gen desktop processors.

 

[Dr. Dro]

But DDR5 is not equivalent to DDR4, now I know I'm on DDR4 myself but if you're starting anew then DDR5 is probably the best way to go now. They're faster, more efficient & definitely more "future proof" though MB's are definitely more expensive than they need to be ~ so buy them during the holiday/year end sales!

DDR4 is an option with these Alder Lake chips, and it won't even suffer much performance-wise as Raptor (true 13th/14th) does with it. You can run the 12900K/KS without much of a perf hit on DDR4. Zen 4 architecture, being newer, already omits DDR4 support entirely, so even at the budget end you have no choice but go with DDR5.

Budget DDR5 that runs at base JEDEC (usually 4800 CL48ish) is pretty bad even compared to super average DDR4-3200 memory.

 

[R0H1T]

Then why are you also counting "platform" costs? You'll have it much much cheaper on AM5 than anything Intel now or for the foreseeable future. Platform includes the lifetime of the platform.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

The only retail market I keep up with is the U.S. Zen 3 is still crushing everything - https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Computer-CPU-Processors/zgbs/pc/229189

Few here are choosing 1700 for NIB budget gaming. AM4 is ubiquitous, cheap, and performant. The 14100 is a poor value, you can get the 12600kf here for the same money. Easy choice.

 

[Dr. Dro]

Then why are you also counting "platform" costs? You'll have it much much cheaper on AM5 than anything Intel now or for the foreseeable future. Platform includes the lifetime of the platform.

That remains to be seen. Buying a promise from AMD is something no one should be doing, given their history of deceit and half-truths with their customers regarding forwards-compatibility (as you are well aware, they lied to us and intentionally withheld Zen 3 support on X370 for upwards of a year on a false justification that they had BIOS ROM size limitations that conveniently disappeared the second Alder Lake released, and the well was completely poisoned, as Reddit and hardware communities started to remark that X370 was dated and motherboard projects were inferior, so people should just suck it up and upgrade their motherboard if they felt Zen 2 wasn't enough for them - all the while the tech press was utterly disinterested in the subject, I remember it well) - and Intel may still release Bartlett Lake processors which should offer 10 and 12 pure P-core options in the future.

In emergent markets, long-term availability of newer architectures means a lot less as people generally don't have the money to upgrade anyway, and in conditions where an upgrade path is available, your motherboard will be pretty dated and supported poorly, by either AMD themselves or its manufacturer. Socket longevity tends to be a boon to buyers of high-end motherboards, but if we're told to beat it when an upgrade actually becomes needed, this point gets completely invalidated. Otherwise, it's simply a matter of many years down the road, having extra performance on tap for an old system when flagships cost lunch money.

As it stands, even if no new processors are released for LGA 1700 in the future, you can still go to an 8+16 SKU, which is a massive upgrade from a 4+0 with a reduced amount of cache and slightly lower IPC compared to the initial configuration.

 

[R0H1T]

We've been over this so many times now ~ for all their deceits & half truths till now AM4 is still having new processors in its eighth(9?) year of operations. This includes the last remnants of Dozer & 3 gens of Zen. Meanwhile the competition is scrambling to deny you warranty for their faulty chips! Are you really sure dying on that hill is worth it?

and Intel may still release Bartlett Lake processors which should offer 10 and 12 pure P-core options in the future.

We still don't know what the fault is, yet you're claiming they'll be trouble free because Intel

In emergent markets, long-term availability of newer architectures means a lot less as people generally don't have the money to upgrade anyway, and in conditions where an upgrade path is available, your motherboard will be pretty dated and supported poorly, by either AMD themselves or its manufacturer.

Actually it's the opposite, anecdotally & demonstrably having an AM4 mobo in production makes it cheaper than ever to go to a Zen 1-3 chip, even second hand easy. Plus cheap replacement mobos are hard to come by! Try buying a SB mobo for cheap, if you can find one. Speaking from experience in a 1.4 billion+ country, admittedly notebooks are a lot more popular here than (desktop) PC.

 

[Chrispy_]

That remains to be seen. Buying a promise from AMD is something no one should be doing, given their history of deceit and half-truths with their customers regarding forwards-compatibility (as you are well aware, they lied to us and intentionally withheld Zen 3 support on X370 for upwards of a year on a false justification that they had BIOS ROM size limitations that conveniently disappeared the second Alder Lake released, and the well was completely poisoned, as Reddit and hardware communities started to remark that X370 was dated and motherboard projects were inferior, so people should just suck it up and upgrade their motherboard if they felt Zen 2 wasn't enough for them - all the while the tech press was utterly disinterested in the subject, I remember it well) - and Intel may still release Bartlett Lake processors which should offer 10 and 12 pure P-core options in the future.

In emergent markets, long-term availability of newer architectures means a lot less as people generally don't have the money to upgrade anyway, and in conditions where an upgrade path is available, your motherboard will be pretty dated and supported poorly, by either AMD themselves or its manufacturer. Socket longevity tends to be a boon to buyers of high-end motherboards, but if we're told to beat it when an upgrade actually becomes needed, this point gets completely invalidated. Otherwise, it's simply a matter of many years down the road, having extra performance on tap for an old system when flagships cost lunch money.

As it stands, even if no new processors are released for LGA 1700 in the future, you can still go to an 8+16 SKU, which is a massive upgrade from a 4+0 with a reduced amount of cache and slightly lower IPC compared to the initial configuration.

Hard disagree.

There were some technical hurdles that mean they wanted to drop older boards but if you go by their actions they've delivered. I dropped a 5800X3D into a B350 mITX system earlier this year for a friend to replace a Ryzen 5 1600, 7 years after building it.

Even if AMD tried to pull the rug, they listened to customers and did the work to make it happen, and they've promised support for AM5 for a similarly long "at least until" timeframe. With AMD I'm inclined to given them the benefit of the doubt because they've literally had a platform that's outlasted something like 5 different sockets from intel and is still receiving new CPUs.

I can't really see this winning the 'an computer' segment at this price, nevermind it winning the middle hundreds gaming PC segment to its older brother the 12100(F) or a 5600. If this was like $90 and the 300 went down to like $70 I think this could have been groundbreaking, but as it is it's asking way too much for way too little.

R5 5600 or i5-12400F are the kings of dGPU budget desktops right now.
Street prices are everything, which is why I doubt that this i3-14100 or the 8500G will hold their high prices for more than a few months.

 

[bug]

For what reason? It is neither affected by the voltage issue nor the oxidation issue.
We can be all like hurr intel lmao sucky sucky but I'd expect a bit better from a TPU forum poster.

Based on what?

 

[TheinsanegamerN]

The $300 price point almost 4 years ago doesn't matter. When the 14th gen launched (which is the only timeframe relevant for comparison), AM4 was the affordable, low-cost platform at around half it's original cost. The same argument also works in reverse, because when the 5600X was $300, it was performing like $300 Intel offerings of 3-4 years ago.

Ok, so what's the price of intel based platforms from 4 years ago? How do they compare now? I'd bet you could get an 11th gen i7 for about the same price and beat the 5600 at its own game easily.

But that's true of every generation, which is why the comparison is silly. You can ALWAYS get previous gen parts for cheap, but of course you're buying into a dead platform which is Le Bad, if its intel that is. You could go buy a 9th or 10th gen intel i7/i9 for cheap and blow away this i3 and the 5600, but nobody recommends that for some reason....

As for the current platform in this price range, AMD may have only the 8500G, but it's better than this; Better CPU, better IGP, better power consumption, better platform lifespan, better drivers. It's win-win-win-win-win.

That doesn't make the i3-14100 awful, it's just a respectable second place performance in a two-horse race.

I disagree. Better CPU? By 1-2%, according to this review, in games. Better IGP? Technically yes, but its not good enough for anything modern anyway, so WGAF?

Platform lifespan I'll give you, but that's also a waste of money. You buy this CPU and mobo, then when you want to upgrade, you have to replace the CPU or get kneecapped by that x4 GPU link, ESPECIALLY with the budget GPUs this thing will be paired with. So, youll end up with either subpar performance or having to upgrade the CPU 2 years later, which is a HUGE waste of resources. It's like the people who talk about how great of a deal their AM4 rigs were, when they spent twice as much on mobo and ryzen 1000, 2000, 3000, second mobo, and 5000 to get where they are, when they could have just bought a 8700k, gotten 95% the performance from day 1, and still be using it. Even if you only bought a ryzen 1000, mobo, then jumped all the way to 5000 and accepted not having full CPU support, you'd still have spent more money.

The i3, not so. It's got a proper x16 link for the GPU, so if you pair it with a 8GB or, in the future, a 12GB GPU, it wont suffer from the severe performance issues known to happen with low VRAM GPUs on x4 links. And yeah, it draws more power. If that is a concern....dont buy a desktop, but a tablet.

 

[Dr. Dro]

Hard disagree.

There were some technical hurdles that mean they wanted to drop older boards but if you go by their actions they've delivered. I dropped a 5800X3D into a B350 mITX system earlier this year for a friend to replace a Ryzen 5 1600, 7 years after building it.

Even if AMD tried to pull the rug, they listened to customers and did the work to make it happen, and they've promised support for AM5 for a similarly long "at least until" timeframe. With AMD I'm inclined to given them the benefit of the doubt because they've literally had a platform that's outlasted something like 5 different sockets from intel and is still receiving new CPUs.


R5 5600 or i5-12400F are the kings of dGPU budget desktops right now.
Street prices are everything, which is why I doubt that this i3-14100 or the 8500G will hold their high prices for more than a few months.

The problem here is you're dealing with a mental block that AMD does not lie and does not do shady business, as if only Intel and Nvidia are capable of that. There was never a technical limitation to begin with, the X470 is an 1:1 identical configuration chipset when put next to the X370, and 16 MB BIOS ROMs were never a limitation to begin with. It simply wasn't a problem, just go look at the Crosshair VI series. Their BIOSes are and remain fully featured and fully functional, with the latest one supporting everything as far back as the first engineering sample of the original Zen CPU. On 16 MB. And if you open it with UEFITool today you'll see there's barely 10 MB of data in it, meaning the decision to strip Excavator support out of it was primarily for consistency rather than a technical limitation.

There was solely a business conflict. They were disinterested in supporting the older boards because they knew they could force people who had an upgrade itch to splurge (Zen 3 was excellent and they knew it), and because it wouldn't affect new buyers, who were likely to just buy B550 and X570 to begin with. I myself sidegraded to a B550 motherboard because they refused to allow ASUS to update my C6H, and as nice as my Strix B550-E used to be, it was barely a sidegrade to the Crosshair. I had no choice but to flip if I wanted the 5950X I had bought to work.

You may not remember it but they initially tried to pull the same stunt with X470, and people got angry and told them to go pound sand. They reverted almost immediately but X370? It really took Alder Lake for them to go back on this. It's not a matter of hard agree or disagree, it's simply a historical fact at this point, this is 4 years in the past and now that the decision has been reverted, it's all too easy to forgive and forget: it remains that AMD took full advantage of the window in which they were indisputably ahead of Intel by an order of magnitude (Ryzen 5950X was a monster when compared to the i9-11900K - then again, even the 5600X performed better in many applications, and they made sure to ask $300 for it) to line their pockets as full as they could get.

It'd be wise not to trust AMD with lofty promises of forwards-compatibility which they may choose at any time, at their sole discretion, to withdraw if it proves to be a lucrative opportunity. As they have in the past.

 

[R0H1T]

We're not talking things ten years down the line but the ones here & now! AM4 is 8 years old now & AM5 almost 2(?) & it'll certainly last till at least 2026 ~ that's still 2x more than any other recent Intel platform that I can think of. The 12-14th gen cluster f*** doesn't count.

 

[Dr. Dro]

Actually it's the opposite, anecdotally & demonstrably having an AM4 mobo in production makes it cheaper than ever to go to a Zen 1-3 chip, even second hand easy. Plus cheap replacement mobos are hard to come by! Try buying a SB mobo for cheap, if you can find one. Speaking from experience in a 1.4 billion+ country, admittedly notebooks are a lot more popular here than (desktop) PC.

You can find them plenty if you don't specifically require Z68/Z77 chipset boards from the big manufacturers. AM4's an old platform now, despite being excellent value and viable - the market has saturated and it's become very commonplace, which drove prices down. That's why we got re-releases this year, to see if they can drive it a little up. It is still excellent value nowadays. But the newest chips for it are also almost half a decade old. Time flies. Zen 3 is about to complete its 4th year soon.

 

[R0H1T]

You can find them plenty if you don't specifically require Z68/Z77 chipset boards from the big manufacturers.

Plenty where? Like I said I tried in a 1.4 billion+ country & I couldn't find them cheap enough, about 4-5 years back, and definitely nothing brand new with warranty. Yes you can try your local shops but they usually wouldn't keep/buy them unless there was demand. DIY are a dying breed & used parts even rarer! You're underestimating the cost to support an old Intel CPU without proper motherboards. It's changing slightly due to AM4 & "gaming" but still way less demand than 10-15 years back.

 

[fevgatos]

withheld Zen 3 support on X370 for upwards of a year on

546 days for my b350. Yes, I counted them.

Hard disagree.

There were some technical hurdles that mean they wanted to drop older boards but if you go by their actions they've delivered. I dropped a 5800X3D into a B350 mITX system earlier this year for a friend to replace a Ryzen 5 1600, 7 years after building it.

Even if AMD tried to pull the rug, they listened to customers and did the work to make it happen, and they've promised support for AM5 for a similarly long "at least until" timeframe. With AMD I'm inclined to given them the benefit of the doubt because they've literally had a platform that's outlasted something like 5 different sockets from intel and is still receiving new CPUs.

They didn't listen to the customers, they listened to alderlake breathing down their neck. The problem is, they gave upgradability when it was obvious that they are going to lose sales to alderlake, and they used that upgradability to fleece customers for every penny. I still remember that their outdated by 2022 zen 3 cpus were sold for as much as intel's parts which were radically faster. For the better part of 2022 the 5800x was price matching a 12700k, lol. It's not very pro consumer to get motherboard upgradability only to have to pay through the nose for the cpu, is it?

 

[Chrispy_]

They didn't listen to the customers, they listened to alderlake breathing down their neck.

I think you have your dates wrong there.

The stories of AM4 dropping support because of small 16MB BIOS chips was related to the 300 and 400-series motherboards supporting the 5000-series was around the launch of the 5000 series CPUs (November 2020)

Alder Lake was a January 2022 launch for desktop, so Alder Lake wasn't even on the radar when the rumours AMD wanted to drop support for the 300-series boards hit the news.

 

[fevgatos]

I think you have your dates wrong there.

The stories of AM4 dropping support because of small 16MB BIOS chips was related to the 300 and 400-series motherboards supporting the 5000-series was around the launch of the 5000 series CPUs (November 2020)

Alder Lake was a January 2022 launch for desktop, so Alder Lake wasn't even on the radar when the rumours AMD wanted to drop support for the 300-series boards hit the news.

Alderlake launched November or October of 2021. B350 / X370 board got bios support early 2022, right after alderlake launched. I don't have it mixed up at all. My b350 got a bios update for zen3 12th of May of 2022.

 

[Chrispy_]

Alderlake launched November or October of 2021. B350 / X370 board got bios support early 2022, right after alderlake launched. I don't have it mixed up at all. My b350 got a bios update for zen3 12th of May of 2022.

Ah okay, I was building with B450 boards back then, didn't realised the 300-series boards took so long to get Vermeer support.
Alder Lake could well have been the reason, though I doubt any official AMD representative would be willing to admit that.

Personally, I though Alder Lake was great, it was the generation that made me go back to building some Intels for the first time in a while - alas I was hit by bendgate and scheduler issues but those were fixable and fixed eventually.

 

[bug]

... There was never a technical limitation to begin with, the X470 is an 1:1 identical configuration chipset when put next to the X370, and 16 MB BIOS ROMs were never a limitation to begin with. It simply wasn't a problem, just go look at the Crosshair VI series. Their BIOSes are and remain fully featured and fully functional, with the latest one supporting everything as far back as the first engineering sample of the original Zen CPU. ...

I don't think that's correct. For AM4, you get to choose between support for first and second or second and third Zen generations. Because of the BIOS size. In the early days of the third generation, it would have been suicide to just kick first gen owner out of the platform. A year later, with many more Zen3 parts in the wild, it was ok to offer a choice.

That said, yes, that was the game AMD played: cheaper CPUs, but they made up for that with really expensive mobos. Most people gave them a pass for that, whereas I pointed out the price of the CPU should never be considered alone.

 

[R0H1T]

but they made up for that with really expensive mobos.

Partly true with x3xx boards but x4xx were a lot cheaper at the mid/lower range & then similarly with B550 post 2019/20 or so. And it's not like cheap Intel boards could handle x900k could they?

 

[bug]

Partly true with x3xx boards but x4xx were a lot cheaper at the mid/lower range & then similarly with B550 post 2019/20 or so. And it's not like cheap Intel boards could handle x900k could they?

What I meant is all this push for PCIe5 and then DDR5-only, made AMD boards comparatively more expensive than Intel equivalents. Like you noted, things settled down after a while. But early adopters were presented with a good deal on the CPU and a not-so-good deal on the mobo.

Not that there's anything wrong with that AMD is still a business, employees still have bills to pay. But I do tend of looking at the bigger picture as much as I can.

 

[Chrispy_]

Partly true with x3xx boards but x4xx were a lot cheaper at the mid/lower range & then similarly with B550 post 2019/20 or so. And it's not like cheap Intel boards could handle x900k could they?

Sometimes a B450 board still makes a lot of sense; If you are using a GPU that uses 16 lanes and not trying to make a video editing machine, PCIe 3.0 is fine.

I've recently bought some B450 Aorus Elite V2 boards for under £80 (inc tax) on sale because they're fine for slapping together an AM4 system if you have a 20 or 30-series RTX card lying around and just need a budget gaming/CUDA rig.

You can ALWAYS get previous gen parts for cheap, but of course you're buying into a dead platform which is Le Bad, if its intel that is. You could go buy a 9th or 10th gen intel i7/i9 for cheap and blow away this i3 and the 5600, but nobody recommends that for some reason....

The thing is, Intel 9th/10th gen are used market only - almost nobody has any stock left today. Only some of the 12th gen parts are still available to buy now, and when inventory sells there's no new stock to replace it.

Ryzen 5 5600 is everywhere, still in stock, still being manufactured, and the 5000-series is still getting new product releases even if they're no longer flagship-tier SKUs.

I advocate buying used PCs. I found a complete Ryzen 5 5600X PC with an RTX 3070 and 16GB/1TB for £475 a couple of weeks ago for a colleague that was on tight budget. It was a steal, probably because the PSU was a heap of shit, but another £70 for a decent PSU and he's got a pretty decent gaming PC for the price of a PS5.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

But the newest chips for it are also almost half a decade old. Time flies. Zen 3 is about to complete its 4th year soon.

5800X3D was released in April 2022. The 5600X is the best selling CPU of all time. And after those almost 4yrs on the market it's still in the top 5 best sellers frequently, here in the U.S. Nothing this century has sold like Zen 3; it's a testament to the impact of platform longevity on CPU sales. All the bluster about AMD support means dick all. That was then, this is now, and Zen 3 works on everything and outsells everything. Some people need to step out of the reality distortion field they are living inside of.

The 14100 is a rebadge of a rebadge with a bad MSRP. The retail market has spoken, and 4 cores have been DOA for a couple of years now. The lowly Ryzen 5500 with it's cutdown cache and PCIe 3.0 consistently outsells everything Intel near its price tier. I don't even know if most of the buyers have any idea it will do 4.6-4.7GHz all core no problemo, after 3 minutes in the UEFI. But it has 6 cores and it's dirt cheap, so it sells really well.

14100 exists in retail because it has to, to fill in the "newest" product stack. It's real niche is in budget prebuilts that lack a dGPU. Few are going to pick it for roll your own.

 

[Dr. Dro]

I don't think that's correct. For AM4, you get to choose between support for first and second or second and third Zen generations. Because of the BIOS size. In the early days of the third generation, it would have been suicide to just kick first gen owner out of the platform. A year later, with many more Zen3 parts in the wild, it was ok to offer a choice.

No. This is the case only for A520, B550 and X570 which do not have Zen/Zen+ support. It's illogical to argue that Excavator support was necessary for people who literally wanted to buy a processor 4 generations newer

5800X3D was released in April 2022. The 5600X is the best selling CPU of all time. And after those almost 4yrs on the market it's still in the top 5 best sellers frequently, here in the U.S. Nothing this century has sold like Zen 3; it's a testament to the impact of platform longevity on CPU sales. All the bluster about AMD support means dick all. That was then, this is now, and Zen 3 works on everything and outsells everything. Some people need to step out of the reality distortion field they are living inside of.

The 14100 is a rebadge of a rebadge with a bad MSRP. The retail market has spoken, and 4 cores have been DOA for a couple of years now. The lowly Ryzen 5500 with it's cutdown cache and PCIe 3.0 consistently outsells everything Intel near its price tier. I don't even know if most of the buyers have any idea it will do 4.6-4.7GHz all core no problemo, after 3 minutes in the UEFI. But it has 6 cores and it's dirt cheap, so it sells really well.

14100 exists in retail because it has to, to fill in the "newest" product stack. It's real niche is in budget prebuilts that lack a dGPU. Few are going to pick it for roll your own.

Yet the 5800X3D is not truly a new part, TSVs for 3D V-cache were already present and installed in the original Zen 3, just the layer wasn't.

I agree that this is now and that was then, but at the same time you're still pitching "trust me bro" as they were then. Suppose that a Rocket Lake scenario repeats in the next generation. What incentive does AMD have to honor forwards compatibility for Zen 6 (which would be their third AM5 architecture)?

It is no reality distortion field to advise against buying into a promise. Fool me once shame on me, fool me twice...