Hi, Guys in this article we will talk about Intel i3-10100F Review | Can it Handle 4K/60fps Gaming? Whenever people build powerful Gaming PCs they tend to spend hundreds of dollars on GPUs and CPUs. But what most people don’t know is that you can very often save a lot of money on the processor side, which becomes increasingly important in a world where prices for hardware parts increase rapidly almost every week.
Now if you’ve kept up-to-date with the coverage of the last few months, you would have seen that AMD and Intel promoted strongly the gaming capabilities of their expensive flagship CPUs, which encourages users to pay a huge price for a processor if they want to play the newest games at higher resolutions. Because of that people are often shelling out 400 dollars or more for a top-tier ryzen 9 or intel i9.
But what difference really is there between a $485 twelve-core 24-thread ryzen 9 and a $115 intel i3-10100F when it comes to 4k gaming? To investigate this I booted up Cyberpunk, Red Dead Redemption 2, GTA 5 and Call of Duty Warzone. and benchmarked both the Ryzen 9 and the i3-10100F. But before we take a look into the test results, let’s compare both CPUs side by side. The Intel i3-10100F has 4 Cores and 8 Threads with a Base clock of 3.6 GHz and a turbo frequency of 4.3 GHz.
It runs on 65 Watts and it costs about $115The ryzen 9 3900x on the other hand has 12 cores and 24 threads with a base clock of 3.8 GHz and a max boost clock of 4.6 GHz. It runs on 105 Watts and it costs about $485.In my tests, both were paired with 16 gigabytes of ram and a new RTX 3060 Ti which should be sufficient for 4k gaming. And starting off with Cyberpunk 2077 here I was able to push above 60 FPS at 4K and low settings for both setups.
That means that while I was gettings an average of 66 FPS with the Ryzen 9 3900xi was getting an average of 65 FPS with our budget CPU.So really not a lot of difference here. Moving on to GTA 5 here we are looking at high settings at of course 4K. Here I was seeing very similar results with the high-end setup reaching an average of 70 FPS and the setup with the intel i3 reaching an average of 68 FPS.
Again not very much different. The third game I tested at 4K and Low settings was red dead redemption 2. Here both setups were pretty much head-to-head with an average of 62 FPS.So again, no noticeable difference. For the last game, I tested Call of Duty Warzone at mid settings and 4K. Here the gap between the high-end and the budget CPU was actually the largest with about 5 FPS. However, you’ll get a playing experience that is virtually identical for both processors.
So overall we can clearly see that 4K gaming is absolutely possible with the intel i3-10100F and that we don’t need to necessarily spend hundreds of dollars on a CPU to get a great Gaming Experience So why is that? Why is a CPU that costs just over $100 dollars as good as one that costs almost $500 dollars? Well, there are two major reasons for that. First of all most games can’t make use of more than 4 cores, which means that the extra 8 cores that the ryzen 9 provides are very often just useless when it comes to playing games.
And the second major reason is that the GPU is usually what determines FPS at high resolutions and high graphics settings. So for example, as you can see here, the GPU is using 99% of its performance, while the CPU is barely touching 20%. so what can you guys take away from all this? If you are planning on building a gaming rig targeted at 60 frames per second and 2K or 4K gaming, the CPU is definitely where you could be saving your money. And even though pairing an RTX 3060 Ti with an intel i3-10100F sounds like a terrible idea, it could actually be the most economical one.
Now after all this why should you ever consider buying a more expensive CPU for gaming? Well while 60 FPS is very achievable for cheaper CPUs, the CPU performance, in general, becomes more important whenever the graphics become simpler, the resolutions get smaller and whenever very high refresh rates are what count. So for example, if you want to play First Person Shooters at 240 Hz, you have to spend more money on your CPU. But again, if 60 FPS is your thing then the $115 Intel i3-10100F processor might be the perfect fit for you.
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So this concludes the topic for Intel i3-10100F Review | Can it Handle 4K/60fps Gaming?. That’s about it for me, I forgot to tell you something, If you’re enjoying this article, please make sure to share the article. If you have any questions, comment down below, and I’ll try my best to answer them.
