The Intel Core i3-12300 in this review is the bigger brother to the Core i3-12100F we reviewed a few weeks ago. Under the hood, these two processors are extremely similar—they are both quad-cores with HyperThreading, so you get eight threads, which means there's no workloads that run terribly due to the lack of cores. Both processors have 12 MB of L3 cache, and the power limits are identical too: 60 W PL1 and and 89 W PL2. On the Core i3-12100F, the PL1 setting is at 58 W, which is essentially the same—2 W really makes no difference. The i3-12300 is the biggest Alder Lake quad-core, the Core i5-12400 is a 6c/12t design. A noteworthy difference to the i3-12100 is that the Core i3-12300 is only available with an integrated GPU, there is no Core i3-12300F. In terms of clock frequencies, the Core i3-12300 ticks at 3.5 GHz base (200 MHz higher than the i3-12100), with boost reaching up to 4.4 GHz (100 MHz more than i3-12100). In summary, this makes the Core i3-12300 a higher-clocked Core i3-12100, which of course comes at higher pricing, too. At $160, the Core i3-12300 is still priced lower than anything interesting AMD offers. The i3-12100 with an IGP costs around $145, and the i3-12100F is $105.

Overall performance of the Core i3-12300 is excellent for the "i3" positioning. Actually, this is the fastest i3 we ever tested as it beats most of last-generations i5 processors. For example, the Core i3-12300 is 2.2% faster than the six-core core i5-11400F, and 10% faster than the Core i5-10400F. Compared to the previous Core i3-10300, the performance uplift is around 20%; Intel never released a Rocket Lake Core i3-11300. These are pretty nice gains. AMD isn't offering any low-end Zen 3 CPUs, the Ryzen 5 5600X is 23% faster than the Core i3-12300, but twice as expensive. The Zen 2 Ryzen 5 3600X is even 1% slower than the Core i3-12300. Compared to the i3-12100, the performance difference is a meager 2% though, which is not totally unexpected considering there's only a 100 MHz clock difference, or 2.3%.

Intel's new Alder Lake architecture brings significant improvements, especially to low-threaded workloads. Unlike the higher-end Alder Lake models, the i3-12300 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 i3-12300 as it's more like a "classical" Intel CPU—there's only one type of core, no reason to go Windows 11.

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 i3-12300 beating much higher-positioned processors. For a machine that sees light usage, desktop work, office productivity, and Internet browsing, the Core i3-12300 is an excellent choice, especially if you don't need, want or can find a discrete graphics card could the i3-12300's integrated graphics be an option. They are perfectly fine for everything, including media playback, just not serious gaming. Even 720p with the lowest settings will not net you 60 FPS in most games. Still, not everybody plays games, and for desktop work, integrated graphics make for a viable solution to avoid the crazy graphics card prices.

Gaming performance of the Core i3-12300 with a discrete graphics card is very good and can easily compare to 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 6% 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 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. As such, you should definitely also consider the Core i3-12100(F) for gaming—it's so affordable and the savings could go towards a better graphics card, which will make a bigger FPS difference than any other upgrade.

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 i3-12300, 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. Besides the most demanding rendering workloads, nothing can hit the power limit, and the differences are minimal even then, 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 130 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 i3-12300 reaches efficiency levels that are slightly worse than the Core i3-12100, sitting roughly between Zen 3 and Zen 2, which is definitely better than what we saw on the Alder Lake "K" models. The low total power draw makes it easy to keep the 12300 cool. Using our Noctua cooler, we measured only 50°C. Intel includes a stock heatsink with the i3-12100F, which reaches temperatures of around 67°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. One important point to consider is that the processor's integrated graphics will eat into the CPU power budget when used. All our testing was done using a discrete graphics card, and we saw no reason to raise the power limit above default. If you plan on using the iGPU, do check with ThrottleStop if you hit any power limits and raise the setting accordingly.

If you've checked out the overclocking section of this review, you've seen our impressive 5.0 GHz all-core overclock. But isn't the Core i3-12300 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 out, it's fairly easy to overclock the i3-12300, 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 i3-12300 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 $160, the Core i3-12300 offers decent value, but falls short of beating the Core i3-12100F, which offers insane value—$105 instead of $160 is a huge difference that simply isn't there in performance. Yes, the i3-12100F doesn't include integrated graphics, which won't be an issue if you plan on using a discrete graphics cards anyway—the i3-12100F is recommended for this system setup. Things change when you want integrated graphics. The Core i3-12100 (non-F) is $145, and I think I'd be willing to spend the extra $15 for the Core i3-12300 even though it's not the most cost-efficient choice mathematically. The i3-12300 also faces strong competition from the Core i5-12400F, which costs $180 and offers a 6-core/12-thread design, but without integrated graphics. For gamers, this is something worth considering, especially when gaming at 1080p, where the CPU does matter more for FPS than at 1440p and 4K. I'd probably be willing to spend that extra cost, too. If you need integrated graphics, the Core i5-12400 upgrade at $200 does seem a bit expensive. While a 6c/12t CPU might be tempting psychologically, the actual performance difference is not big enough to justify the extra cost. The bottom line is that the Core i3-12300 is sandwiched between two VERY strong offerings (12100F and 12400F) that also come at excellent pricing. AMD really has nothing in this segment, the Ryzen 5 5600X is just too expensive at over $300. Maybe the $260 Ryzen 5 5600G with faster integrated graphics could be an option, but it still won't get you 60 FPS at 720p in many modern games. I'm not seeing much competition from the Intel 11th, 10th, and 9th-generation processors either, unless you of course already have one and "no upgrade" is a compromise you're willing to make.

A major issue is the high platform cost of Alder Lake DDR5—it makes absolutely no sense to pair the i3-12300 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 the H610, but has a slightly better feature set. When every dollar matters, picking the H610 will still get you a good experience. The used market could also be a good option as there certainly are people looking to unload older LGA1151 or LGA1200 motherboards at a good price, possibly with the CPU included.