Why you can trust Tom's Hardware Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.
Adobe Creative Cloud
The Core i3-8100 performs well through our Adobe suite, taking fourth place overall. It beats the Ryzen processors in every test except for the After Effects sub-test, where AMD's unlocked multipliers help swing the advantage in Ryzen 5's direction.
Web Browser
The Krakken suite tests JavaScript performance using several workloads, including audio, imaging, and cryptography. Intel's Core i3-8100 nudges ahead of the -7100 by a slim margin.
The MotionMark benchmarks, which focus on testing the graphics subsystem rather than JavaScript performance, are very sensitive to clock rate. That lends the previous-generation Core i3-7100 an upper hand over the -8100.
Productivity
The application start-up metric measures load-time snappiness in word processors, GIMP, and Web browsers, under warm- and cold-start conditions. Core i3-7100 once again beats the Core i3-8100 due to its higher frequency ceiling. We also see impressive performance enabled by the -8400's top Turbo Boost bin.
Video conferencing measures performance in single- and multi-user applications that utilize the Windows Media Foundation for video playback and encoding. It also performs facial detection during the workload to model real-world usage. This task responds well to extra threads, allows the Ryzen 5 1500X to shine. The Core i3-8100 offers solid performance for its price, and it ekes out a win over the competing Ryzen 3 models.
The photo editing benchmark measures performance with Futuremark's binaries that use the ImageMagick library. Common photo processing workloads also tend to be parallelized, so we see a lot of the same behaviors. The overclocked Ryzen 3 1300X beats Intel's Core i3-8100, and the heftier Ryzen 5 models also perform well. Clock rates play a pivotal role in determining performance, too, as the quad-core Core i3-8350K bests a six-core Core i5-8400.
Spreadsheet-heavy tests emphasize clock rates even more, so again, Core i3-7100 outperforms the newer -8100. Meanwhile, the -7350K's static 4.2 GHz frequency lends it an advantage over the i3-8350K and i5-8400.
MORE: Best Cheap CPUs
MORE: Intel & AMD Processor Hierarchy
MORE: All CPUs Content
