Intel Core i3-12300

[W1zzard]

Intel's Core i3-12300 is reasonably priced at $160 and offers the best i3 performance yet. In our review, we found this 4c/8t processor to offer good application and gaming performance thanks to the new Golden Cove cores, and the lack of E-cores can actually be a good thing as it eliminates compatibility issues completely.

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[oxrufiioxo]

This is a pretty meh product at 160 usd kinda surprised it got a highly recommended award.... At 140-150 usd maybe. Product segmentation is what it is I guess. This seems like an oem cash grab type product to me.

 

[Lionheart]

What a disappointment, it should of had a much higher single/all core turbo.

 

[mahoney]

I remember when 1st gen Ryzen came out and AMD fanboys were screaming quad cores are dead. 4 years later and a budget intel quadcore is demolishing everything from Ryzen 1st gen and refresh.

 

[HD64G]

Now I get it! Intel launched in very small quantities the 12100 to make them seem customer friendly and great in vfm, then made much more 12300s that will be sold in much higher price and offer 1-2% better performance. Smart marketing from Intel's side for not tech informed customers to be fooled by... And it reminds me of the AMD's 3300X that was reviewed, got the vfm trophy of that generation and was nowhere to buy. Alongside the fake MSRPs from nVidia for the RTX30 GPU series. Sneaky tactics. Customers, beware!

 

[mahoney]

This is a pretty meh product at 160 usd kinda surprised it got a highly recommended award.... At 140-150 usd maybe. Product segmentation is what it is I guess. This seems like an oem cash grab type product to me.

12100f is 115€ in Europe. It has no igp and 100mhz lower turbo boost.

 

[oxrufiioxo]

I remember when 1st gen Ryzen came out and AMD fanboys were screaming quad cores are dead. 4 years later and a budget intel quadcore is demolishing everything from Ryzen 1st gen and refresh.

That's because we basically got 7 generations of them prior to intel deciding it was cool to let the mainstream have 6 or more cores. Also it was the 4 core 4 thread variants that aged very poorly especially the 6600 and 7600. The 8 thread parts are still fine for most stuff with the ADL variants being pretty awesome for what they are.

 

[mahoney]

That's because we basically got 7 generations of them prior to intel deciding it was cool to let the mainstream have 6 or more cores. Also it was the 4 core 4 thread variants that aged very poorly especially the 6600 and 7600. The 8 thread parts are still fine for most stuff with the ADL variants being pretty awesome for what they are.

Yeah but there were people literally switching to Ryzen from i7's(Skylake and DevilCanyon) and then complaining why they were getting lower fps in certain games. Seen a couple of posts on r/intel with people questioning what was going on. You can use the waybackmachine and just check on r/amd how crazy people were during the launchday some of the shit that was being said is hillarious to read now. Like future bios update's that will give performance boost in games... Delusion at it's finest.

 

[Sithaer]

Little bit of a typo at the start of the review:

This isn't the cheapest 12th Gen Core i3 you can buy, as that title goes to the almost-$100 i3-10100F. 'and then it links to the proper 12100F review'

On a side note, I wanted to order a 12100F this week along with a B660 mobo and ofc the 12100F had to vanish from the etailers in my country so gonna wait till its available again. 'it goes for around 140 $ with VAT included'

 

[oxrufiioxo]

Yeah but there were people literally switching to Ryzen from i7's(Skylake and DevilCanyon) and then complaining why they were getting lower fps in certain games. Seen a couple of posts on r/intel with people questioning what was going on. You can use the waybackmachine and just check on r/amd how crazy people were during the launchday some of the shit that was being said is hillarious to read now. Like future bios update's that will give performance boost in games... Delusion at it's finest.

Well the internet is the internet mostly full of fanboys for either side.... Anyone with half a brain can do proper research into competing products and decide what's best for them anyone shocked by the performance of something they've purchased obviously didn't pay attention to reputable reviewers.

 

[catulitechup]

@W1zzard good review but where appear igp tests*

*I no hope much from this but is interesting for complete review

 

[W1zzard]

This isn't the cheapest 12th Gen Core i3 you can buy, as that title goes to the almost-$100 i3-10100F. 'and then it links to the proper 12100F review'

Fixed

On a side note, I wanted to order a 12100F this week along with a B660 mobo and ofc the 12100F had to vanish from the etailers in my country so gonna wait till its available again. 'it goes for around 140 $ with VAT included'

Plenty of stock here in Germany, I actually bought all these CPUs (I have more reviews in the pipeline)

 

[TheinsanegamerN]

That's because we basically got 7 generations of them prior to intel deciding it was cool to let the mainstream have 6 or more cores. Also it was the 4 core 4 thread variants that aged very poorly especially the 6600 and 7600. The 8 thread parts are still fine for most stuff with the ADL variants being pretty awesome for what they are.

See, the problem with this argument is that it is pulled out of context. There was a very good reason mainstream platforms were quad core, and that was the utter lack of benefit from more cores. Intel made 6 core parts, they were long available on HDET platforms, and they CONSISTENTLY performed worse then quad core mainstream parts despite having thos elegendary 6 cores, more cache, and triple or quad channel memory.

Even with ryzen, it took until the 4th generation zen 3 chips to finally beat intel's ancient skylake cores at gaming. Intel really started phoning it in with kaby lake, but skylake was a noticeable improvement over haswell. the demand for 6 cores rose with the latter half of the PS4/xbone generation, when game engine sfinally made use of 6 cores, but as recent as 2017 quad cores were still handing out with 6-8 core CPUs in terms of framerate, and even today a quad core can still maintain 60 FPS 1% minimums, which is sufficient for the 90+% of the market using 60hz monitors.

By the time the 4/4 CPUs started aging poorly their platforms were coming up on half a decade old and most of those consumers had already upgraded.

 

[GorbazTheDragon]

Really unfortunate none of the board vendors are willing to make a cheap(ish) DDR4 board with BCLK OC... They would sell gangbusters...

were long available on HDET platforms, and they CONSISTENTLY performed worse then quad core mainstream parts despite having thos elegendary 6 cores, more cache, and triple or quad channel memory.

Sandy and Ivy E compared to their desktop counterparts didn't perform worse. Haswell was a shitshow because of the memory situation, Broadwell didn't clock well (and still had the memory problems). Skylake had mesh, so the cache and memory latencies were far worse than on the mainstream desktop platform.

Compare memory latency on X99 and X299 6/8/10 core parts to those on the 1151/1200 6/8/10 core parts. It's worlds different, not to mention the desktop stuff in general was easier to clock fast.

More memory bandwidth doesn't give you more performance. Lower latency under load does (which is why DDR5 performs so well).

 

[TheinsanegamerN]

Really unfortunate none of the board vendors are willing to make a cheap(ish) DDR4 board with BCLK OC... They would sell gangbusters...


Sandy and Ivy E compared to their desktop counterparts didn't perform worse. Haswell was a shitshow because of the memory situation, Broadwell didn't clock well (and still had the memory problems). Skylake had mesh, so the cache and memory latencies were far worse than on the mainstream desktop platform.

Compare memory latency on X99 and X299 6/8/10 core parts to those on the 1151/1200 6/8/10 core parts. It's worlds different, not to mention the desktop stuff in general was easier to clock fast.

More memory bandwidth doesn't give you more performance. Lower latency under load does (which is why DDR5 performs so well).

See, what's funny is if you go and benchmark these chips again today, with games that can use 6 cores, they are WAY faster then quad cores from that era. Back then, they were not.

Consumer workloads simply didnt need that many cores.

For further reference: you can look at AMD's own Phenom II x6, which despite being on a consumer platform with 6 core sstill couldnt match the performance of 4c/4t i5s, hence why it sold for a whopping $200. There was one exception to this: battlefield 3 scaled to 8 cores and showed huge improvements when running on the phenom. I wont even bring up the attorcity known as the construction cores. The same people screaming about how quad cores are dead and 8 cores ar eneed were saying the same thing about dual cores when the core 2 quad came out.

 

[thelawnet]

@W1zzard good review but where appear igp tests*

*I no hope much from this but is interesting for complete review

yes.

the review is a bit obvious

100 Mhz clock speed increase cannot hope for much, and indeed there is not much

I am not sure why this phrase appears in the review


"The H610 is the bare entry-level chipset. You lose out on memory overclocking, only get Gen3 PCIe connectivity across the board"

all the h610 boards have pcie 4.0 PEG

 

[WhoDecidedThat]

Intel where is my P core only (4 core or 6 core) K series processor? 6 cores of Golden Cove @ 4.8 GHz all core should be pretty alright for gaming.

 

[Chrispy_]

The elephant in the room here is stilll Comet Lake; The 10100 and 10400F are cheaper, come with a wide array of B560 boards that are a bare minimum of $30 cheaper than the cheapest, nastiest B660 board you can find. Until stocks of either 500-series boards or Comet Lake CPUs dry up, Alder Lake is overpriced against it. If you go for an H-series board you're basically throwing away most of the reasons to choose Alder Lake in the first place.

When an i3-10100 is 80% the speed of a 10300 and yet costs $200 for the platform instead of almost $300 for the 12300 platform, that minor performance difference doesn't really alter much for your extra $90-100, and the i3 is aimed squarely at the part of the market where performance/$ is the single most important metric by an almost-unspeakably wide margin.

 

[Lionheart]

I remember when 1st gen Ryzen came out and AMD fanboys were screaming quad cores are dead. 4 years later and a budget intel quadcore is demolishing everything from Ryzen 1st gen and refresh.

Who gives a rats ass, stop trying to bring up fanboyish jargon.

 

[bug]

Now I get it! Intel launched in very small quantities the 12100 to make them seem customer friendly and great in vfm, then made much more 12300s that will be sold in much higher price and offer 1-2% better performance. Smart marketing from Intel's side for not tech informed customers to be fooled by... And it reminds me of the AMD's 3300X that was reviewed, got the vfm trophy of that generation and was nowhere to buy. Alongside the fake MSRPs from nVidia for the RTX30 GPU series. Sneaky tactics. Customers, beware!

It's called binning: you will push a chip as far as it can go and you will charge as much as you can in return. Assuming a normal distribution, chips at either end of the scale will naturally be found in lower numbers than the rest.
If you want to attach a conspiracy or a rip-off story, that's simply your option.

 

[seth1911]

Atm i have not much money so I bought the 10100F cause its cheaper,
10100F 76€,
H410 Board 52€,
8GB DDR4 31€
-------------------
159€

I3 12100F 110€
H610 90€ / B660 112€
8GB 31€
-----------------------
231€/253€


If i want upgrade i can still get an 10400 etc.

 

[oxrufiioxo]

It's called binning: you will push a chip as far as it can go and you will charge as much as you can in return. Assuming a normal distribution, chips at either end of the scale will naturally be found in lower numbers than the rest.
If you want to attach a conspiracy or a rip-off story, that's simply your option.

I think if they had made it a K sku it would've made a lot more sense at $160 usd may have even ended up a fun little chip to tweak they still could have a non k vairent for oems.... Feels like a long time since the i3-9350K came out even though it was only 2 and a half years ago

 

[GorbazTheDragon]

See, what's funny is if you go and benchmark these chips again today, with games that can use 6 cores, they are WAY faster then quad cores from that era. Back then, they were not.

Consumer workloads simply didnt need that many cores.

For further reference: you can look at AMD's own Phenom II x6, which despite being on a consumer platform with 6 core sstill couldnt match the performance of 4c/4t i5s, hence why it sold for a whopping $200. There was one exception to this: battlefield 3 scaled to 8 cores and showed huge improvements when running on the phenom. I wont even bring up the attorcity known as the construction cores. The same people screaming about how quad cores are dead and 8 cores ar eneed were saying the same thing about dual cores when the core 2 quad came out.

The difference is down to the fact that when you run out of width on your processor (you saturate all the cores) you can't go any faster without either upping core clocks or adding more cores. Improving memory system performance doesn't do anything when you have saturated your cores and are bottlenecked on that. And where it does do something it tends to barely be measurable, or at the very least far less than the 50% gain you would get by going from 4 to 6 cores...

So despite having a worse memory subsystem, the higher core count stuff can still scale to some degree on games that use those cores. That's why you'll see a 1700x win in some games by a pretty large margin over a haswell quaddie but lose in others. Some will saturate the quad cores, others will not and get hung up on the memory system instead.

Those X99 CPUs still choke really hard in plenty of modern games btw and it's almost entirely because of the memory subsystem

 

[Turmania]

Either the price is too much for this or they had to make it at least in such a way that all boost cores would be at least 4.5ghz for this price.

 

[Selaya]

The elephant in the room here is stilll Comet Lake; The 10100 and 10400F are cheaper, come with a wide array of B560 boards that are a bare minimum of $30 cheaper than the cheapest, nastiest B660 board you can find. Until stocks of either 500-series boards or Comet Lake CPUs dry up, Alder Lake is overpriced against it. If you go for an H-series board you're basically throwing away most of the reasons to choose Alder Lake in the first place.

When an i3-10100 is 80% the speed of a 10300 and yet costs $200 for the platform instead of almost $300 for the 12300 platform, that minor performance difference doesn't really alter much for your extra $90-100, and the i3 is aimed squarely at the part of the market where performance/$ is the single most important metric by an almost-unspeakably wide margin.

you also get a better igp too since 630 > 730 and id argue igp performance's more important (well, can always plug in something like a 1030 later but yea) if you're not doing a budget gaming build w/ dgpu