Intel Core i3-8100 CPU Review

Project CARS

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Core i5-8400 demonstrates the benefit of six cores in a threaded game, leading Intel's Core i3-8100 by a significant margin. Still, the Core i3-8100 wields its four cores to great effect, beating the price-comparable Ryzen models by ~13 FPS and sliding past the pricier Ryzen 5s, even after we overclock them.

Again, the Core i3-7100 tumbles down the chart, falling 24 FPS behind its Coffee Lake-based successor. That's a ~39% generational speed-up in this title.

Far Cry Primal

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Far Cry Primal's Dunia Engine 2 responds well to high clock rates and IPC throughput. However, it also seems to run better with simultaneous multi-threading disabled. That plays well to the Core i5/i3 and Ryzen 3 models, which don't feature SMT support.

As expected, Core i3-8100 leaps over its previous-generation counterpart, but lags the Core i3-8350K.

Even after we lock frequencies to the same 3.9 GHz, our overclocked Ryzen 5 1400 trails the 4C/8T Ryzen 5 1500X. The tuned 1400 wasn't stable with its memory set to 3200 MT/s. Instead, we could only achieve 2933 MT/s, which does affect gaming performance. We suspect the Ryzen 5 1400's 8MB of L3 cache, which is half of what the 1500X includes, has an impact on some workloads.

Rise of the Tomb Raider

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Rise of the Tomb Raider
 is a recurrent thorn in AMD's side. Recent patches fixed the most glaring issues, but Intel processors still handily outperform their Ryzen competition. The Core i3-7100 again shows how significantly the entry-level Kaby Lake-based CPUs fall behind today's Coffee Lake models.

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