Intel Core i3-13100F Review: Higher Pricing, Smaller Gains

Intel Core i3-13100F Productivity Benchmarks — The TLDR

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The first slides are simplified without the overclocking configs, while the remainder of the slides in the album covers the full roster of tested configurations. We boil productivity application performance down into two broad categories: single- and multi-threaded. These slides show the geometric mean of performance in several of our most important tests in each category, but be sure to look at the individual benchmark results below.

Again, due to the $40 price gap between them, the $150 Core i3-13100 and $110 13100F each have a different competitor in our test suite. With six Zen 3 cores and 12 threads, the $140 Ryzen 5 5600 easily leads our threaded benchmark suite with 30% more performance than the Core i3-13100. The six-core, 12-thread $99 Ryzen 5 5600 is also plenty impressive with a 20% lead over the 13100 in threaded workloads. 

The Intel 13100/F takes the lead in single-threaded work, with a 20% lead over the Ryzen 5 5600 and a 25% lead over the Ryzen 5 5500. That will result in snappier responsiveness in lighter fare, but the 13100/F's slow-downs in threaded work will be far more noticeable than its performance advantage in single-threaded work. Overall, the Ryzen 5 5600 and 5500 deliver a better blend of performance at their respective price points. 

The Core i3-13100/F exhibits a more meaningful lead over the 12100/F in the productivity benchmarks than we saw in the gaming benchmarks, delivering 6% more performance in both single- and multi-threaded applications. However, this doesn't really justify a ~15% price hike, again making the 12100 the more reasonable choice if you're specifically looking to buy an Intel chip. 

Notably, none of these chips benefit much from overclocking, with low-single-percentage-point gains. The benchmarks below are pretty predictable, with the Ryzen processors dominating the threaded benchmarks while Intel takes smaller leads in lightly-threaded applications. As such, we'll limit our commentary.

Rendering Benchmarks on Intel Core i3-13100F

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Here we have a quad-core attempting to fend off two six-core 12-thread chips in heavily threaded rendering applications. As you would expect, that doesn't go too well, with the Ryzen 5 5600 and 5500 both taking substantial leads in all manner of threaded workloads. The Core i3-13100/F does carve out a few wins in the single-threaded rendering tasks.

Encoding Benchmarks on Intel Core i3-13100F

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Most encoders tend to be either heavily threaded or almost exclusively single-threaded — it takes an agile chip to master both disciplines. Handbrake, SVT-HEVC, and SVT-AV1 serve as our threaded encoders, while LAME, FLAC, and WebP are indicative of how the chips handle lightly-threaded engines.

Adobe, Web Browsing, Office, and Productivity on Intel Core i3-13100F

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Compilation, Compression, AI Chess Engines, AVX-512 Performance on Intel Core i3-13100F

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Aside from the compression/decompression tests, most of these benchmarks aren't as important for this class of processors, but we include them for the sake of completeness. As you can see, AMD easily wins the compression and decompression benchmarks due to both the advantage of having more cores and specific architectural optimizations that benefit this type of work. 

The remainder of the benchmarks run the gamut from the exceedingly branchy code in the LLVM compilation workload to the massively parallel molecular dynamics simulation code in NAMD to encryption and compression/decompression performance. The demanding Y-cruncher benchmark computes Pi with the AVX instruction set and has optimizations for both Intel and AMD’s architectures.  

The Core i3-13100/F pulls off a few wins in single-threaded tests, but the rest of the benchmarks are nearly entirely in AMD's favor. 

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