In today's review, we've looked at Intel's most affordable Alder Lake "Core" processor. There are still also the Pentiums and Celerons, but those are dual-core, probably too slow for most tasks. The Intel Core i3-12100F is a quad-core with Hyper-Threading, so it offers eight threads, which should be able to handle everything. Also included are clock frequencies of 3.3 GHz base, 4.3 GHz boost and 12 MB of L3 cache. The most important "specification" is the price, though. With just $105, the Core i3-12100F is one of the most affordable processors around.

Overall performance of the Core i3-12100F is very good given its "i3" positioning, thanks to the new Golden Cove processor cores, which bring significant improvements, especially in low-threaded workloads. Unlike the higher-end Alder Lake CPUs, the i3-12100F does not feature any E-cores, which Intel introduced with this generation to reach core count parity with AMD and offload less intensive workloads to these cores that are engineered to operate with higher energy efficiency at lower clocks and voltage. E-cores let non-time critical workloads execute with reduced power impact, heat output, and battery drain (on mobile devices). The drawback is that it's not trivial for the processor to decide whether to schedule a program on the efficient E-cores or faster P-cores. While this logic generally works well, we found several cases of tasks getting scheduled on the wrong cores in our Core i9-12900K review, which had serious performance implications. All this is no problem on the i3-12100F as it's more like a "classical" Intel CPU—there's only one type of core, no reason to go Windows 11.

Averaged over our real-life application tests, we found the Core i3-12100F to be more than 25% faster than the Core i3-10100 Comet Lake. It's also able to match the last-generation Rocket Lake Fore i5-11400F—these are some serious improvements gen-over-gen. Another important achievement is that it's the clear winner in the duel against AMD's Ryzen 3 3300X, and can match the 6-core Ryzen 5 3600X. In the hunt for bigger profits, AMD has pretty much exited the entry-level processor market. Ryzen 3 3100 and 3300X are EOL, their most affordable Zen 3 processor is the Ryzen 5 5600X, which costs $310, almost three times as much as the Core i3-12100F. There are still a bunch of Athlons around the $100 price point, and the Ryzen 3 1200, but these are old designs that are in no way competitive with Intel's offerings.

What's important to highlight is that even though this is "just a quad-core", you can't compare it to quad-cores from a few years ago. Intel's new Golden Cove cores are so much faster clock-for-clock because of vastly improved IPC. You can easily see this in our group of productivity tests, which are low-threaded, where we often find the 12100F beating much higher-positioned processors. For a machine that sees light usage, desktop work, Office productivity, and Internet browsing, the Core i3-12100F is an excellent choice. Actually, if you don't need a lot of GPU horsepower you probably want to consider the Core i3-12100 (without F), which is the same processor as in this review, but with integrated graphics, for $30 more.

Gaming performance of the Core i3-12100F is surprisingly good, too, especially compared against popular higher-end CPUs from previous generations. For example, at 1080p Full HD resolution, the Core i3-12100F beats the Core i5-9400F, i5-10400F, and i5-11400F. It also beats the Core i5-10600K and Ryzen 5 3600X—two CPUs that are widely recognized as "recommended for gamers." AMD's entry-level Zen 3 offering, the Ryzen 5 5600X, is only 7% faster at 1080p. The fastest CPUs in our test group are up to 20% faster, but of course more expensive, too.

As you increase the gaming resolution, the bottleneck shifts more and more away from the CPU and to the GPU. At 4K, most CPUs are very similar in the FPS rates they offer—here, it's actually better to buy a cheaper CPU to save money that can be spent on a faster GPU. The differences vary a lot between games, especially older titles using the DirectX 11 API benefit more from a faster CPU, while DX12 games are more often GPU limited.

Back in our launch-day coverage, the "big" K-model Alder Lake CPUs couldn't impress with their energy efficiency despite the improved 10 nanometer production process. The underlying reason is that Intel bumped their power limits up incredibly high to win a few showoff benchmarks, like Cinebench. On the i3-12100F, things are better, as Intel picked much more reasonable values of PL1=60 W and PL2=89 W. Actually, even the PL1 setting is sufficient for nearly all workloads. Even Cinebench and other rendering tasks stay slightly below that limit, which explains why we saw no meaningful gains from removing the power limit. Power limit adjustments are easy and supported on nearly all motherboards, even those with more affordable chipsets, which have no overclocking support.

Total system power draw is very light—we could barely hit 120 W. These power levels should be easy to handle for any PSU. When taking into account performance and power consumption to calculate the total energy used for a certain task, the i3-12100F reaches efficiency levels that are quite close to AMD's Zen 3 CPUs, much better than what we saw on the Alder Lake "K" models. This low power draw is also a blessing for the cooling requirements of the i3-12100F. Using our Noctua cooler, we measured only 42°C. Intel includes a stock heatsink with the i3-12100F, which reaches temperatures of around 60°C—very nice.

Intel has a long history of locking features on lower-end models, and not much has changed with Alder Lake. While AMD gives you free unlocked multipliers on all models, Intel wants you to pay up for that capability gated behind the "K"-suffix. Features are also segmented by chipset. For example, you can't overclock the memory on the cheaper H610 chipset, which also doesn't give you a CPU-attached M.2 NVMe slot even though the processor supports it technically. What I also find surprising is that Intel doesn't include their Turbo Boost 3.0 capability on these lower-end processors. It would have been an easy way to eke out a little bit of additional performance.

If you've checked out the overclocking section of this review, you've seen our impressive 5.2 GHz all-core overclock. But isn't the Core i3-12100F locked? Indeed, it is. Multiplier-based overclocking isn't available, but given the right motherboard, you can overclock all Alder Lake CPUs. The secret sauce is Alder Lake's integrated clock generator. Traditionally, the CPU's base clock (BCLK) was generated on the motherboard and fed to the processor. In order to reduce motherboard design cost and complexity, Intel included an internal clock generator with Tiger Lake and added that capability to Alder Lake, too. For some reason Intel decided you should still be able to feed an external BCLK signal to the processor—in their press briefings, they vaguely mentioned this was for enthusiast overclockers. ASUS has included such a clock generator on their higher-end Z690 motherboards, like the Z690 Hero used in our testing. From here on it's fairly easy to overclock the i3-12100F, and the results speak for themselves. It's still more of an academic curiosity at this stage because it makes little sense to buy a value processor like the i3-12100F and pair it with an expensive high-end motherboard. Given the press this newfound OC capability has been receiving lately, I wouldn't be surprised if we see a B660 motherboard with external clockgen soon; that is, unless Intel decides to block this kind of overclocking.

Priced at $105, the Core i3-12100F offers insane value. It's clearly the best choice in this segment. AMD really has nothing, as mentioned before, and the strongest competitors are Intel's own 11th, 10th and 9th gen processors, including "buy used" and "do not upgrade." A major issue is the high platform cost of Alder Lake DDR5—it makes absolutely no sense to pair the i3-12100F with an expensive Z690 motherboard and even more expensive DDR5. In this review, I still benched with that setup to ensure a fair comparison. I also included results with DDR4, running with highly affordable DDR4-3200 CL16, and the differences are slim: DDR4 is the way to go for entry-level Alder Lake. This also reduces motherboard cost. You probably want B660 as it's only slightly more expensive than H610, but has a slightly better feature set. When every dollar matters, picking H610 will still get you a good experience. The used market could also be a good option as there's certainly people looking to unload older LGA1151 or LGA1200 motherboards at a good price, possibly with the CPU included.