Introduction

Intel Core i3-14100 is the most affordable processor model from Intel's 14th Gen Core processor family, with a price of just $140. There's also a variant of this chip without integrated graphics, the Core i3-14100F, which is priced at an impressive $125. The i3-14100 targets the vast majority of desktop PC users who just need to get through office productivity workloads, a rich web experience, and aren't into heavy content creation or high-end gaming. The Core i3-14100 is 4-core/8-thread, and is a traditional multicore, with just P-cores.

That said, the chip, particularly its i3-14100F sibling, targets the entry-level gaming PC market, where with a little smart budgeting with the motherboard and memory, you could pair this processor with a fairly good performance-segment graphics card. Helping matters is the architecture's support for older DDR4 memory besides the latest DDR5, which means you get to save a little more that you can spend on the graphics card.



The Core i3-14100, with the rest of the 14th Gen Core family is technically referred to by Intel as Raptor Lake Refresh. This chip, however, is based on the same H0 die powering entry-level Intel Core processors going back to the 12th Gen Alder Lake. The silicon physically only has six "Golden Cove" performance cores (P-cores), and no E-core clusters, besides 18 MB of L3 cache. Intel created the i3-12100, i3-13100, and the i3-14100 we're reviewing today, by disabling two of the six cores and cutting down the L3 cache to 12 MB. Each of the four available cores has 1.25 MB of dedicated L2 cache and the processor has Hyper-Threading enabled, making it a traditional 4-core/8-thread chip.

The Core i3-14100 comes with a base frequency of 3.50 GHz, and a maximum Turbo Boost frequency of 4.70 GHz. This is a 100 MHz increase in base frequency, and 200 MHz increase in maximum boost frequency, over the previous generation i3-13100; and a 200 MHz gain in base frequency, along with a 400 MHz gain in boost frequency, over the i3-12100. The three are architecturally the same chip. Intel configured the i3-14100 with a processor base power of 60 W, and a maximum turbo power of 110 W. What's interesting here is that the maximum turbo power value has gone up from the 89 W for the i3-12100.

Perhaps the best aspect of the Core i3-14100, and Intel's entry-level processor models in general, is that they have the same I/O as the high-end models, unlike entry-level AMD Ryzen chips, which tend to have crippled PCIe interfaces compared to their top models. The i3-14100 can drive a full PCI-Express 5.0 x16 PEG interface on motherboards that support Gen 5 x16, and a CPU-attached Gen 4 x4 meant for M.2 NVMe. The integrated graphics solution with this chip is the UHD 730, which is the entry-level model of iGPUs for Raptor Lake and Alder Lake. It comes with just 24 execution units and a 1.50 GHz clock speed. It's enough to light up a monitor for 2D productivity, but there's no way you'll be able to do much contemporary gaming with it.

Intel is pricing the retail Intel Core i3-14100 at $140. If you intend to build a gaming PC with this chip, you don't strictly need integrated graphics, and you're better off going with the six core 12400F to save $35, or the i3-14100F to save $15. The retail package includes a fan-heatsink which is sufficient to deal with the thermals of this chip, which lacks any meaningful overclocking capabilities anyway.