More than legit lol. You can literally build a semi-decent 60fps 1080 or 1440p gaming rig with an i3 nowadays! So much more powerful than i3 back then.
While this CPU hasn't aged well an i7-2600 is still surprisingly capable after over a decade and you could have gotten away with updating the GPU every few years especially if you aren't aiming for more than 1440p. So it would have been a great investment.
The Sandy Bridge architecture is what Core 2 Quads were 5-6 years ago. It's cheap, runs a lot of modern games decently, and you can still extract what's left from it
I'm digging sand bridge content being made in 2022. I got a i7-2700k with 16gb ram in a military grade mother board inside a gaming case for 60 bucks at a thrift store. I went down that rabbit hole and got 3 or 4 slim desktops with i5-2500 in them. They are still being used today but those i5s are in gaming rigs for my kids now
I used to run an old i3 like this. It was an office PC I found. I changed to a FX 6300, and I got a massive performance increase in modern games. It really shows how mainstream games have been using more threads for years.
Nah, its just because you had 2 cores, which can barely run windows anymore. 4 cores has been the standard for idk how long, and only now games are starting to adapt to 6, 8 and some even 12/16
Well a FX 6300 is way weak for today's modern games. It's decent for the PS4 era, but where Zen 2 CPUs are more than double of performance of a FX chip...
I have a system I use as a network repeater with an i3-2100. It is not a modern gaming CPU by any stretch. However, this CPU is still surprisingly decent as an office style PC. Web browsers and basic programs are still pretty snappy in my experience, which is something that even some newer Celerons can't claim. I also run a system alongside it with an i5-2400, which has also aged surprisingly well.
I have a buddy who has an older NAS that had a Celeron (2 core no HT). We put the i3-2100 in it and triple-or-more the performance. (Also tried an i5-2500 (non-k) with the same TDP, but the little box couldn't handle the heat.)
I recently built a cheap thin itx pc using this cpu. runs GTA IV 800x600 at a little over 20 fps lol. it uses an old hdd from a broken laptop, 2x4gb ram, an intel dh61ag board, a 190w laptop psu, and a stock cooler. I also designed and printed a tiny case for it that uses the stock intel cooler as an intake. edit: I plan on updating the bios and replacing the 2100 with a 3770s, but it was fun to see how it performed.
it could really shine with a SSD and a GPU. GTA IV ran so bad because of this, the iGPU was especially bad in the 2nd gen intels (intel hd 3000) but the HD 4000 and 4600 of the 3rd and 4th gen were already much better, and now with a discrete GPU it could really shine in most modern games! And a SSD could help too, not only making the computer much faster, but it could help a lot in some open-world games such as GTA. I might be wrong but I remember that Minecraft was much faster on my laptop once I switched to an SSD. Before it was unplayable on a HDD! So yeah, if you put a SSD and a GPU on that thing it's going to really shine! Edit: oh and if you manage to get another 2x4GB of RAM you'll be able to do even more modern games with a lot more stability and more programs running in the background.
A dual-core i3 can play games just fine - if it is a decently recent one. And for what it is worth the CPU can still run some halfway modern games even. Sure, not worth buying it if you also need to buy a motherboard (old boards are really hard to get for a decent price), but it works. And if you look at modern 2-core CPUs like a pentium 6400/7400, or Athlon 3000G - they give decent performance even in modern titles.
Budget pc videos are amazing and there should be more of them. Everyone seems to be onto the latest and greatest nowadays which is okay but there should be a balance
I dony know why but i just love the videos you put out. I dont even plan on getting any of the old stuff you review but its entertaining non the less. Pls keep it up
when stuff becomes obsolete i find getting the the best for that socket and or overclocking the crap outta it a bit pointless. if were building era perfect stuff that is. each to there own i guess when building old hardware
@@Bassjunkie_1 thats crazy I always overclock older hardware to the brink of destruction its so fun squeezing every last fps out of “obsolete” tech. 300mhz gets to be a much bigger difference when ur talking about an old i3
I am using a dual core as my main video editing and gaming CPU in 2022. And it is doing quite well. I have a Intel Pentium G7400, which is the same socket as the i3 12100. The Pentium G7400 has 2 cores, 4 threads, and beats a i7 3770 in most tasks while using less than half the power.
@@sweeflyboy With so many part numbers brother, I wouldn't feel any sort of negative way about remembering incorrectly. Lol. We're only human. Cheers, take care man.
I literally have a ton of used i7-900 series processors sitting in a box. I've tried giving them away, but usually the people that want one of these are weird AF, or they think they can drop it into a socket 775 motherboard.
I felt called out by your elden ring joke. I actully have played the original dark souls on a very underpowered tablet with a z8350 and 4gb of single channel LPDDR3. I got on average around 20-30fps with huge stutters and roughly 400ms input delay. Blight town was a slide show at 4-10fps. Still managed to beat it ar NG+6.
You've got the motherboard, you've done the Sandy Bridge poster boy; the 2500k, and now an entry-level i3, is it going to be the 2600k/2700k, or going all-in on the 3770k next? I know, I know the 3770k wasn't soldered, so shouldn't overclock quite as well as the 2600k, but it does have that slight ipc advantage.
plus you have it really warm in the winter, saving gas well played. Had the cpu too back in the day, now running a r5 3600 which is a beast i dont see why someone would need anything better for gaming.
My dad was holding on to this prebuilt Acer i3 2100 system he bought in 2011, which I replaced last year with an i5 7600 system I built for him with older parts I had but he still kept the system in the corner. And I went up to visit last week to visit over thanksgiving (I'm in the US) and he was like is older system worth anything? and I was like no. and I took some parts from it - some ram I gave him, an SSD he upgraded and he kept the CD rom drive if he ever wanted to put it in his new tower (doubtful) and The motherboard and case was proprietary and the motherboard was dying, case was broken anyway and the only thing of real value left in the system was this processor.
@@Jarmundx As much as this would sound strange, I don't like their methodology of testing cpus. They are a big channel, I like some of their videos though, but not all. They are testing K Intel cpus on stock speeds, but almost no one buying a K unlocked cpu on a good motherboard will use them on stock speeds. Now, not sure if they shill for AMD, but I stopped watching their channel for some time now. Also, the way they test PC cases for temps is strange as well.
I’ve been running an i3-2100 for… too long now, mainly because it’s what came in my parents’ custom build around the early 2010s. The rest of the rig is ok-ish, GTX 1050, 10 GB ram, SSD internal drive with an older HDD (I think) for external storage, it’s not a modern beast but it’s alright for barely being upgraded over a decade minus the initial drive ending itself and us needing to replace it, resulting in us also upgrading from onboard graphics. I don’t know if I just haven’t optimized anything or if Windows 10 and the games I play on PC (which aren’t intense at all) are just too much, but I can barely hit a stable frame rate ever. It’s aiming for 60 and sometimes it hits it, but it doesn’t all that often. On top of that, web browsing of all things is slow (on 300+ mbps download over wired connection, not the internet’s fault) and a couple tabs can use 80-90% of the CPU’s power. Maybe part of it is stuff running off of the external drive, again maybe I’m dumb and haven’t optimized anything, but it sucks. I think the thing that truly kills it now is it’s inability to run Windows 11, once 10 stops getting security patches we’ll kinda have to upgrade just for safety’s sake. It’s a bad experience, and I can’t wait to not have to deal with it anymore.
Someone gave me a Dell Inspiron 620 with an i3-2120 and 8GB of RAM. I upgraded the CPU to the Xeon E3-1245, 16GB of RAM, and a SSD. The system run decently now and it could do some gaming if I could find a GTX 1650 for a decent price. I did have to upgrade the CPU cooler to accommodate the extra cores and threads the Xeon 1245 has.
Used to have this i3 back in the day. Paired with a H61 motherboard from Foxconn and a GTX 1050, it served me well for years (i mostly played CSGO, GTA V), until i got an upgrade to a 9100F (and a GTX 970) in 2019
I went from a C2D e6300, to an i3-540 with a mid range Gigabyte board, and could overclock it to high heaven, totally stable at 4Ghz - but I kept to a 3.8Ghz for longevity. Performance was amazing back then. Only a handful of titles like Gothic 4 gave that CPU trouble. For what I spent, I was match far more expensive CPU's in gaming. From dual HD4770's, to a 6870, to a GTX580 - that PC lasted me multiple generations of GPU. After a while though, 2 cores were not enough, and I jumped to a 2600 non-K from a machine I bought from builder contractors at an office clearance for .... £20 for the entire system. I got 7 identical systems, for £20 a piece, each with a 2600, Dell board, 4GB and a 120GB SSD.
Currently using an ivybridge i3 and honestly it isnt as bad as people make it out to be. The key to get the most out of these old dual cores is in optimising windows, like really optimising. I got the process count for my windows 10 down to 53 at idle and at 60 maximum and paired with a gtx 1050ti i can play any ps4 era games at locked 30 fps similar to the base consoles performance. And these chips are legit good enough for a first time pc player who wants to game on a really low budget.
i have like half a dozen i3 2100's and its 2120/2130 bretheren just from discarded office pc's it was the Go to "its not a pentium" for office pcs in the early 2010s, and it did work for that role anything ouside of office work and media consumption tho? maybe if you want to make a fast Windows XP mashine ....
I have an i3 2120 laying around somewhere, but really, all its good for is playing games pre-2015 and just basic computing. Even with an SSD, its still not a great computing experience either. Going to a $20 i7 2600 makes a world of a difference.
I used to run one of these 2100 on a pc bought from a family member back in the day, I didn't knew this rascal had 4 threads, it came paired with a 9600gt that granted me a better than I expected gaming experience. It served me very well from around 2012 till 2018 where some things on the system kicked the bucked and I went for a new build with an I5 7400 and a 1050ti, I didn't study the parts all that much at the time but they have done well until recently. Now I'm working on a few upgrades for modern games
I remember 5-7 years ago when the cheapest 3rd-4th gen Core i3 was 20$ more then the cheapest FX 8 core the FX 8300. I can proudly say that FX 8300 can still game and can multitask better than most gen 6-7 Core i5
With a an ok aftermarket cooler they run very very cool at idle, when i paired this up with a AMD 7850, my system very rarely went above 23c at idle at all
I don't know, I got these system: i3 2100 used 128gb ssd m.2 NVMe pcie 3.0 x2 4GB DDR3-1600 MHz H-61 new m-atx mobo with 3 years warranty 400w new PSU with 8 years warranty random used office pc case (cleaned, but still there's some rust left) all for 50 pounds, including tax and shipping and it's been a month, working smoothly and perfectly for office stuff (excel and such), browsing and watching youtube ( including this video), playing multimedia files like music and video, and playing retro games including emulation up to PS2. Oh, I use 22" 1080p100Hz monitor, cheap speaker and kb+mouse combo (from logitech at least)
We talk about the CPU speed gains over the years, but efficiency doesn't get enough talk. Absolutely insane to see a dual core 3.1GHz processor requiring a 65W TDP.
Remember the old days of arguing with people whether the i3, Pentium, or Phenom II x4 processor was better for a budget build. lol, I used to tell people to save up another $50 and get the i5-2400. The lga1155 platform turned out to be the best choice over AM3. Sometimes I get these old platform for free or next to nothing. I have a growing collection of 1st Gen i7 processors and 2nd to 3rd Gen i3 and Pentium processors.
Seeing this makes me so happy that I ended up buying an AMD Ryzen 5 5600X for my new CPU upgrade. And going from an AMD Ryzen 5 1600X to the 5600X was a HUGE upgrade to me!
I subjected a 4170 to Genshin with 6GB of RAM and NO dedicated GPU. It crawled, but the graphics looked slightly sparkly and the game would crash sometimes. I got a SLIGHTLY better time after running the game in a window at some microscopic resolution.
The people who said that the eye can't see more than 24 FPS clearly haven't seen The Hobbit trilogy in HFR. Either that or they're simply insensitive to the lack of motion smoothness I can tell if a YT video is 60 or 30 FPS within the first second 99% of the time
Where I live these are still sold in new pcs with chinese motherboards for around 1000 bucks, which would be around 150 pounds, a medium sized store client of the pc store that I work in just ordered 6 pcs like that for business and they work quite well, my retro pc uses one of these too
I'm running a 2c/4t Pentium G4560 3.5GHz on a MSI PC Mate H270 with 2x4GB 2400MHz, Trancend 220s 256GB NVMe and a GTX1650 GDDR5 and am playing recent games at okayish FPS on low settings 1080p (which is my HTPC)... Also, FYI, a "turn" in Civ6 is just 1 AI player... so with 8 AI (which is an average single player game) you're looking at 80 seconds until you can play again (this is end-game based)... shaving off 3 seconds per turn is a huge amount (24 seconds), and if you think about it some more... your turn usually lasts about 1-2 minutes in end-game, so...
I'm surprised more comments aren't mentioning this, as it makes a huge difference on these older cpus. I have a 3rd gen i7 and it makes a massive difference
3770 or 3770k fits in that socket and runs modern titles in 1080p with highly playable fps imho. But then again, I started out on a C64.... Only problem is that DDR3 ram is now more expensive than DDR4 where I live.
Much of it is relative and was considered "good enough" for the time when core2duo was still hanging in there. However those who choose modern i3s in 2022 may find themselves desiring to upgrade sooner than they think if they wish to play future games competently, this based on the past 10 years of progress. Hell when I picked up my then new first gen i7, plenty of people called my purchase "pointless" and a "waste of money."
Throughout the entire video I was screaming in my head, why didn't increase the bclk in the z77 motherboard to overclock it? It's 10 cents, will you kindly torture it please? By the way the intermission music between the benchmarks is a bit too loud.
People praising i3 12100 and thinking that its different now completely ignores that i3 2100 was in exact same situation 10 years ago. As hard to believe 12100 wont age well as every other i3. Historically i3 always had just bare minimum while for "future proofing" you need much more than that, 2600(k) can still deliver relatively decent gaming perf while 2100 is dead in the water, if you care about your cpu longevity you need more than enough and that lands in i7 range of cpus.
Wow, imagine if you tried to do these benchmarks again while running multiple videos on a second screen and capturing gameplay footage off the cpu. Would it even survive?
I've seen you highlight deals from CEX before, and I have to say I'm envious of UK citizens having access to such great deals on older hardware. We've got nothing like that in the US.
To be fair, I think 1440p at max/ultra settings isn't doing it any favors, I'd say 1080p low settings may be fine for at least 30FPS, maybe 60 FPS in some.
People are still talking about i3-2100?? I felt bad having a i5-2400 back in 2014 or something instead of a i5-2500k or 2600. Got a 6700k when everyone else was not leaving there i7-47x0 systems. Or cursing for getting a i5-45x0 with Intel being * leaving us with i7-4790k being the king of kings! Got 6700k after 7700k launched btw. Just beacuse missing out on the gold gens twice at that point with no hopes in sight for anything better then a 6700k. It really was first when intel released the 12400-12700k you where really in need of leaving 2500k-2700k. And last I checked Intel has released 13th gen and AMD got Ryzen 5000 that even makes 12th gen look questionable to buy. Let alone some 13th or 14th gen. i3-2100. I mean it works. But even in Linux it was to easy to get a unpleasant experience watching RUclips as the core count chokes the performance here in 2023. And my I5-2400 is in my data backup server. But found a old 2500k system with a dead gigabyte mobo thrown into a corner long ago. So now I run a SFF old Lenovo desktop with a 2500k :) Makes the days gaming on the i5-2400 feel less painful having to enjoy a flawless Linux media center box today at basically no cost! Even now the 2500k is basically just a 2400 in this use case.
for a short while I had to use an i3 2100 + 12gb ddr3 + HD 7790 2gb (gcn2 so good dx12 and vulkan support). I was really enjoying GTA4 using dxvk that time lol, it ran so much better than my better PCs; mostly due to dxvk ofc
I gave away one of these and a i5-2400 and i5-2500 for free 2-3 years ago. No one should have to pay for a 2xxx series cpu. the i3 sat in a prebuilt. changed it to a 2500k and it was ok with a gtx660 at the time.
depends on many things. If you don't use it and the old owner didn't overclocked it for XXX hours, you may have a decent CPU for a very, very good price
I think Intel were just being conservative with the TDP. i3s at this time had no boost clock, so this just ran at 3.1GHz flat out. More power wouldn't have helped. EDIT: to clarify, the TDP wasn't being limited in the BIOS or anything like that, and the power profile was set to maximum performance.
Battlefield V runs so much better in Dx11, even my i7 960 can run a 64 player conquest without any significant frame drops/stuttering. Dx12 never worked for me, I've experienced huge frame drops on my 5600X/16GB/3060 Ti system too.
Imo i think running games at high setting at 1440p is super unrealistic for an i3-2100. You should have tried low-med settings at 1080p for a more realistic usecase/test
In conclusion i3 these day are really good ! I upgrade my i3 6100 for a i3 12100F and i love this CPU i still have my 1050Ti but now my gpu bottleneck my cpu but i have now 100+ FPS on any game i play in high !!
Ooo interesting.. I say that as im going though my hardware atm and i have this cpu and a Biostart h61 mobo.. but for some god dam reason after post it just hangs on the windows load screen, and i mean the going to installs windows loads screen, so just after it loads the usb drive to load into the installer.. i cant even install windows 7 via dvd. i put it to the side for now to take a further look at later as i have so many pc projects going on. would you have any ideas? the mobo didn't even have a battery in it to reset as it was in storage
Perhaps 1080p instead of 1440? Not that I game in 1080 anymore but for a poor 10 yr old kid who's never played on pc before, this might be a super bargain..
Still leagues better than the Sandybridge Celeron I have...somewhere. Honestly haven't paid any attention to it once I no longer needed it for BIOS updating - I keep on finding it and going "what CPU is this".
In the early days of DX 11 and older games, the 2c/4t was enough. Now? Nope. Dragon Quest XI destroyed an i3 6100 I had, then upgraded to Ryzen 5 2600 and now the 5600x.
Modern i3 now these days are legit good enough.
Quad core beast with the same P cores as the i9.
@@comrademonolith5421 indeed
Modern i3's are like the early i7's from the early 2010's.
I3 6006U dualcore 4 threads, excellent for emulation
More than legit lol. You can literally build a semi-decent 60fps 1080 or 1440p gaming rig with an i3 nowadays! So much more powerful than i3 back then.
While this CPU hasn't aged well an i7-2600 is still surprisingly capable after over a decade and you could have gotten away with updating the GPU every few years especially if you aren't aiming for more than 1440p. So it would have been a great investment.
Even a i7 2600 bottlenecks a RTX 2060 or better at higher resolutions.
The 2600 is still capable because intel has not innovated till now
I'd reccomend the K variant as you can overclock it to 3.8GHZ
i still have i5 2500 😆, going to upgrade to i7 2600
@@nukemansvk142 Get the 2600k it's better for overclocking
The Sandy Bridge architecture is what Core 2 Quads were 5-6 years ago. It's cheap, runs a lot of modern games decently, and you can still extract what's left from it
I'm digging sand bridge content being made in 2022. I got a i7-2700k with 16gb ram in a military grade mother board inside a gaming case for 60 bucks at a thrift store. I went down that rabbit hole and got 3 or 4 slim desktops with i5-2500 in them. They are still being used today but those i5s are in gaming rigs for my kids now
I used to run an old i3 like this. It was an office PC I found. I changed to a FX 6300, and I got a massive performance increase in modern games. It really shows how mainstream games have been using more threads for years.
Nah, its just because you had 2 cores, which can barely run windows anymore. 4 cores has been the standard for idk how long, and only now games are starting to adapt to 6, 8 and some even 12/16
Well a FX 6300 is way weak for today's modern games. It's decent for the PS4 era, but where Zen 2 CPUs are more than double of performance of a FX chip...
@@takehirolol5962 I am aware, but I still got a huge performance increase relative to the i3.
@@vogonp4287 Massive?
@@takehirolol5962 It made CSGO, Elite Dangerous, Minecraft, and No Man's Sky playable.
I have a system I use as a network repeater with an i3-2100. It is not a modern gaming CPU by any stretch. However, this CPU is still surprisingly decent as an office style PC. Web browsers and basic programs are still pretty snappy in my experience, which is something that even some newer Celerons can't claim. I also run a system alongside it with an i5-2400, which has also aged surprisingly well.
I have a buddy who has an older NAS that had a Celeron (2 core no HT). We put the i3-2100 in it and triple-or-more the performance.
(Also tried an i5-2500 (non-k) with the same TDP, but the little box couldn't handle the heat.)
How much power consumption while it's a repeater?
@@excess.subiefl0w I'm really not sure. I don't have a meter to test it.
I built a cheap Linux rig with a 2100, 8GB DDR3 and an HD 6450.
I used a 2120 for 5 years until this year. It struggled at times, but for a 2 core office CPU it was punching above its weight
I recently built a cheap thin itx pc using this cpu. runs GTA IV 800x600 at a little over 20 fps lol. it uses an old hdd from a broken laptop, 2x4gb ram, an intel dh61ag board, a 190w laptop psu, and a stock cooler. I also designed and printed a tiny case for it that uses the stock intel cooler as an intake.
edit: I plan on updating the bios and replacing the 2100 with a 3770s, but it was fun to see how it performed.
it could really shine with a SSD and a GPU.
GTA IV ran so bad because of this, the iGPU was especially bad in the 2nd gen intels (intel hd 3000) but the HD 4000 and 4600 of the 3rd and 4th gen were already much better, and now with a discrete GPU it could really shine in most modern games!
And a SSD could help too, not only making the computer much faster, but it could help a lot in some open-world games such as GTA. I might be wrong but I remember that Minecraft was much faster on my laptop once I switched to an SSD. Before it was unplayable on a HDD!
So yeah, if you put a SSD and a GPU on that thing it's going to really shine!
Edit: oh and if you manage to get another 2x4GB of RAM you'll be able to do even more modern games with a lot more stability and more programs running in the background.
A dual-core i3 can play games just fine - if it is a decently recent one. And for what it is worth the CPU can still run some halfway modern games even. Sure, not worth buying it if you also need to buy a motherboard (old boards are really hard to get for a decent price), but it works.
And if you look at modern 2-core CPUs like a pentium 6400/7400, or Athlon 3000G - they give decent performance even in modern titles.
Budget pc videos are amazing and there should be more of them. Everyone seems to be onto the latest and greatest nowadays which is okay but there should be a balance
I dony know why but i just love the videos you put out. I dont even plan on getting any of the old stuff you review but its entertaining non the less. Pls keep it up
You could have got the i3-2130 for the same price which has an additional 300mhz on the cores bringing it up to 3.4ghz.
when stuff becomes obsolete i find getting the the best for that socket and or overclocking the crap outta it a bit pointless. if were building era perfect stuff that is. each to there own i guess when building old hardware
@@Bassjunkie_1 thats crazy I always overclock older hardware to the brink of destruction its so fun squeezing every last fps out of “obsolete” tech. 300mhz gets to be a much bigger difference when ur talking about an old i3
It's obsolete no matter what you do.
I have a 2130, kind of usable for daily usage
can you even overclock the non-k CPUs? I thought non-k overclocking was only for 1st gen intel
I am using a dual core as my main video editing and gaming CPU in 2022. And it is doing quite well. I have a Intel Pentium G7400, which is the same socket as the i3 12100. The Pentium G7400 has 2 cores, 4 threads, and beats a i7 3770 in most tasks while using less than half the power.
Still rocking my i3 540 and i'm sure it has 4 threads and has HT as CPU-Z can confirm. Its lacking a lot but still plays multiplayer games with ease.
I'd love to see an i5-2400 review. That would make for the 1155 Trifecta.
There aren't any 2400K CPU's.
There are NEVER any X400K SKU's.
@@nexxusty Oh alr, my memory obviously decided to be unreliable today. Coulda sworn that there was, but you are correct.
@@sweeflyboy With so many part numbers brother, I wouldn't feel any sort of negative way about remembering incorrectly. Lol. We're only human.
Cheers, take care man.
@@nexxusty Haha, same to you!
i have i5 2320 but its 5% difference from this one
7 views. Haven't even finished it yet.
Thank you for the wonderful content, man.
Ultimate comparison: Disable all but two cores and 4 threads on the Ryzen 5 5600x to see how it compares with the i3
I'd love to see you test some LGA1156 socket CPUs, you can get a Xeon X3470 for really cheap (basically a i7 870)
Socket 1155
@@groenevinger3893 they meant 1st gen intel CPU
LGA1155 is 2nd and 3rd gen intel, understand the sentence before replying to a comment
I got a free i7 870 and p55 motherboard and it overclocks well, it even took some junky 1333 memory out of an old dell to 1800mhz
I literally have a ton of used i7-900 series processors sitting in a box. I've tried giving them away, but usually the people that want one of these are weird AF, or they think they can drop it into a socket 775 motherboard.
I felt called out by your elden ring joke. I actully have played the original dark souls on a very underpowered tablet with a z8350 and 4gb of single channel LPDDR3. I got on average around 20-30fps with huge stutters and roughly 400ms input delay. Blight town was a slide show at 4-10fps. Still managed to beat it ar NG+6.
you'd gain a lot of cool points from me if you also play it on a keyboard
You've got the motherboard, you've done the Sandy Bridge poster boy; the 2500k, and now an entry-level i3, is it going to be the 2600k/2700k, or going all-in on the 3770k next? I know, I know the 3770k wasn't soldered, so shouldn't overclock quite as well as the 2600k, but it does have that slight ipc advantage.
Great video! I still game on an FX8320. It's better than the Core2 Duo that I previously had.
plus you have it really warm in the winter, saving gas well played. Had the cpu too back in the day, now running a r5 3600 which is a beast i dont see why someone would need anything better for gaming.
@@d.ink3d need the 5800X3D otherwise I'm bottlenecking the 7900 XTX.
@@d.ink3d damn that r5 3600 is the new i5 2500k, iconic
@@med3099 Not nearly as old though
@@trr4gfreddrtgf that's why it's the new one.
My dad was holding on to this prebuilt Acer i3 2100 system he bought in 2011, which I replaced last year with an i5 7600 system I built for him with older parts I had but he still kept the system in the corner. And I went up to visit last week to visit over thanksgiving (I'm in the US) and he was like is older system worth anything? and I was like no. and I took some parts from it - some ram I gave him, an SSD he upgraded and he kept the CD rom drive if he ever wanted to put it in his new tower (doubtful) and The motherboard and case was proprietary and the motherboard was dying, case was broken anyway and the only thing of real value left in the system was this processor.
I would like to see 10 generations leap testing: i7-870 vs i7-10700, same for i5 and i3. Cheers
Gamers Nexus actually has a video in that same vein, go check their channel.
@@Jarmundx As much as this would sound strange, I don't like their methodology of testing cpus. They are a big channel, I like some of their videos though, but not all. They are testing K Intel cpus on stock speeds, but almost no one buying a K unlocked cpu on a good motherboard will use them on stock speeds. Now, not sure if they shill for AMD, but I stopped watching their channel for some time now. Also, the way they test PC cases for temps is strange as well.
I’ve been running an i3-2100 for… too long now, mainly because it’s what came in my parents’ custom build around the early 2010s. The rest of the rig is ok-ish, GTX 1050, 10 GB ram, SSD internal drive with an older HDD (I think) for external storage, it’s not a modern beast but it’s alright for barely being upgraded over a decade minus the initial drive ending itself and us needing to replace it, resulting in us also upgrading from onboard graphics. I don’t know if I just haven’t optimized anything or if Windows 10 and the games I play on PC (which aren’t intense at all) are just too much, but I can barely hit a stable frame rate ever. It’s aiming for 60 and sometimes it hits it, but it doesn’t all that often. On top of that, web browsing of all things is slow (on 300+ mbps download over wired connection, not the internet’s fault) and a couple tabs can use 80-90% of the CPU’s power. Maybe part of it is stuff running off of the external drive, again maybe I’m dumb and haven’t optimized anything, but it sucks. I think the thing that truly kills it now is it’s inability to run Windows 11, once 10 stops getting security patches we’ll kinda have to upgrade just for safety’s sake. It’s a bad experience, and I can’t wait to not have to deal with it anymore.
Hey Iceberg Tech, do you think you could make the music 9n between a bit softer? It's too loud compared to your voiceover.
Sure
@@IcebergTech Thanks buddy
Use to rock this one from late 2011 till 2020. Really a great processor.
its really not. But i guess it can run something, at least.
Someone gave me a Dell Inspiron 620 with an i3-2120 and 8GB of RAM. I upgraded the CPU to the Xeon E3-1245, 16GB of RAM, and a SSD. The system run decently now and it could do some gaming if I could find a GTX 1650 for a decent price. I did have to upgrade the CPU cooler to accommodate the extra cores and threads the Xeon 1245 has.
i love old cpus, only just dropped my i7 2600 for an i7 8700
Used to have this i3 back in the day. Paired with a H61 motherboard from Foxconn and a GTX 1050, it served me well for years (i mostly played CSGO, GTA V), until i got an upgrade to a 9100F (and a GTX 970) in 2019
I went from a C2D e6300, to an i3-540 with a mid range Gigabyte board, and could overclock it to high heaven, totally stable at 4Ghz - but I kept to a 3.8Ghz for longevity. Performance was amazing back then. Only a handful of titles like Gothic 4 gave that CPU trouble. For what I spent, I was match far more expensive CPU's in gaming. From dual HD4770's, to a 6870, to a GTX580 - that PC lasted me multiple generations of GPU.
After a while though, 2 cores were not enough, and I jumped to a 2600 non-K from a machine I bought from builder contractors at an office clearance for .... £20 for the entire system. I got 7 identical systems, for £20 a piece, each with a 2600, Dell board, 4GB and a 120GB SSD.
Currently using an ivybridge i3 and honestly it isnt as bad as people make it out to be.
The key to get the most out of these old dual cores is in optimising windows, like really optimising.
I got the process count for my windows 10 down to 53 at idle and at 60 maximum and paired with a gtx 1050ti i can play any ps4 era games at locked 30 fps similar to the base consoles performance.
And these chips are legit good enough for a first time pc player who wants to game on a really low budget.
i have like half a dozen i3 2100's and its 2120/2130 bretheren just from discarded office pc's
it was the Go to "its not a pentium" for office pcs in the early 2010s, and it did work for that role
anything ouside of office work and media consumption tho? maybe if you want to make a fast Windows XP mashine ....
Managed to game BF3 and BF4 at 900p with 550Ti back in the day with this 1st CPU.
2:30 Music creepin up, Me: *HYPED*
my brother just upgraded from a phenom ii x4 955 to an i3 7100. mostly so he could go to a 7700k later on
I have an i3 2120 laying around somewhere, but really, all its good for is playing games pre-2015 and just basic computing. Even with an SSD, its still not a great computing experience either. Going to a $20 i7 2600 makes a world of a difference.
I used to run one of these 2100 on a pc bought from a family member back in the day, I didn't knew this rascal had 4 threads, it came paired with a 9600gt that granted me a better than I expected gaming experience. It served me very well from around 2012 till 2018 where some things on the system kicked the bucked and I went for a new build with an I5 7400 and a 1050ti, I didn't study the parts all that much at the time but they have done well until recently. Now I'm working on a few upgrades for modern games
I remember 5-7 years ago when the cheapest 3rd-4th gen Core i3 was 20$ more then the cheapest FX 8 core the FX 8300.
I can proudly say that FX 8300 can still game and can multitask better than most gen 6-7 Core i5
Seeing some people having CPUs worse than mine makes me a tiny bit happier seeing people suffer as well :>
(i5 4460 iGPU)
AMD E2 7110 APU.
💀💀
OMG I have this one, used to play on it WoW during WoD. Upgraded after that lol. It still lives on playing 1080p videos on Linux.
I remember having an i3-2120 as a temporary PC back in 2015. Oh boy how times have changed what comes to the usability of these chips.
as someone who often plays games from yesteryears, before 2010 this cpu is perfect for em and getting it this cheap is just cherry on top
Iceberg tech when he realizes that a 2nd generation dual core quad threaded CPU doesnt run every game at 1440p 144+ fps
With a an ok aftermarket cooler they run very very cool at idle, when i paired this up with a AMD 7850, my system very rarely went above 23c at idle at all
I don't know, I got these system:
i3 2100 used
128gb ssd m.2 NVMe pcie 3.0 x2
4GB DDR3-1600 MHz
H-61 new m-atx mobo with 3 years warranty
400w new PSU with 8 years warranty
random used office pc case (cleaned, but still there's some rust left)
all for 50 pounds, including tax and shipping
and it's been a month, working smoothly and perfectly for office stuff (excel and such), browsing and watching youtube ( including this video), playing multimedia files like music and video, and playing retro games including emulation up to PS2.
Oh, I use 22" 1080p100Hz monitor, cheap speaker and kb+mouse combo (from logitech at least)
We talk about the CPU speed gains over the years, but efficiency doesn't get enough talk. Absolutely insane to see a dual core 3.1GHz processor requiring a 65W TDP.
Remember the old days of arguing with people whether the i3, Pentium, or Phenom II x4 processor was better for a budget build. lol, I used to tell people to save up another $50 and get the i5-2400. The lga1155 platform turned out to be the best choice over AM3.
Sometimes I get these old platform for free or next to nothing. I have a growing collection of 1st Gen i7 processors and 2nd to 3rd Gen i3 and Pentium processors.
Seeing this makes me so happy that I ended up buying an AMD Ryzen 5 5600X for my new CPU upgrade. And going from an AMD Ryzen 5 1600X to the 5600X was a HUGE upgrade to me!
love these videos, keep up the good work
I subjected a 4170 to Genshin with 6GB of RAM and NO dedicated GPU. It crawled, but the graphics looked slightly sparkly and the game would crash sometimes. I got a SLIGHTLY better time after running the game in a window at some microscopic resolution.
The people who said that the eye can't see more than 24 FPS clearly haven't seen The Hobbit trilogy in HFR. Either that or they're simply insensitive to the lack of motion smoothness
I can tell if a YT video is 60 or 30 FPS within the first second 99% of the time
Where I live these are still sold in new pcs with chinese motherboards for around 1000 bucks, which would be around 150 pounds, a medium sized store client of the pc store that I work in just ordered 6 pcs like that for business and they work quite well, my retro pc uses one of these too
I'm running a 2c/4t Pentium G4560 3.5GHz on a MSI PC Mate H270 with 2x4GB 2400MHz, Trancend 220s 256GB NVMe and a GTX1650 GDDR5 and am playing recent games at okayish FPS on low settings 1080p (which is my HTPC)... Also, FYI, a "turn" in Civ6 is just 1 AI player... so with 8 AI (which is an average single player game) you're looking at 80 seconds until you can play again (this is end-game based)... shaving off 3 seconds per turn is a huge amount (24 seconds), and if you think about it some more... your turn usually lasts about 1-2 minutes in end-game, so...
Did You disabled Spectere Meltdown mitigations?
I'm surprised more comments aren't mentioning this, as it makes a huge difference on these older cpus. I have a 3rd gen i7 and it makes a massive difference
No, I was thinking I might make a seperate video about Spectre & Meltdown. I know TYC covered it a while back, but it might be worth a revisit.
3770 or 3770k fits in that socket and runs modern titles in 1080p with highly playable fps imho. But then again, I started out on a C64.... Only problem is that DDR3 ram is now more expensive than DDR4 where I live.
Much of it is relative and was considered "good enough" for the time when core2duo was still hanging in there. However those who choose modern i3s in 2022 may find themselves desiring to upgrade sooner than they think if they wish to play future games competently, this based on the past 10 years of progress.
Hell when I picked up my then new first gen i7, plenty of people called my purchase "pointless" and a "waste of money."
Your videos are so professional and fun to watch, keep it up :D
Throughout the entire video I was screaming in my head, why didn't increase the bclk in the z77 motherboard to overclock it? It's 10 cents, will you kindly torture it please? By the way the intermission music between the benchmarks is a bit too loud.
People praising i3 12100 and thinking that its different now completely ignores that i3 2100 was in exact same situation 10 years ago. As hard to believe 12100 wont age well as every other i3. Historically i3 always had just bare minimum while for "future proofing" you need much more than that, 2600(k) can still deliver relatively decent gaming perf while 2100 is dead in the water, if you care about your cpu longevity you need more than enough and that lands in i7 range of cpus.
Wow, imagine if you tried to do these benchmarks again while running multiple videos on a second screen and capturing gameplay footage off the cpu. Would it even survive?
Fortnite - the frame rate absolutely needs to be capped in my experience, to avoid big stuttering, even on my i9-10900. Great video!!
Watching this video with my i3 2120 box opener in front of me
Now the price is going to rise
you’ll be surprised how much the Pentium G7400 can do, a dual core 4 thread chip for 12th gen.
Im sitting here running an i3 2100 for my media server lol. Does surprisingly well still for that anyway.
I've seen you highlight deals from CEX before, and I have to say I'm envious of UK citizens having access to such great deals on older hardware. We've got nothing like that in the US.
I believe CEX used to have some stores in the states, but they quit about 4-5 years ago.
@@IcebergTech I've spent three decades here, but I've never heard of them. They must have been very far from where I live if they were here.
To be fair, I think 1440p at max/ultra settings isn't doing it any favors, I'd say 1080p low settings may be fine for at least 30FPS, maybe 60 FPS in some.
In Indonesia this pre historic processor still being sold for 80k rupiahs or about 5 pounds. 50 times more expensive than the UK
I remember playing DotA2 with this puppy back in the day.
People are still talking about i3-2100?? I felt bad having a i5-2400 back in 2014 or something instead of a i5-2500k or 2600. Got a 6700k when everyone else was not leaving there i7-47x0 systems. Or cursing for getting a i5-45x0 with Intel being * leaving us with i7-4790k being the king of kings! Got 6700k after 7700k launched btw. Just beacuse missing out on the gold gens twice at that point with no hopes in sight for anything better then a 6700k.
It really was first when intel released the 12400-12700k you where really in need of leaving 2500k-2700k. And last I checked Intel has released 13th gen and AMD got Ryzen 5000 that even makes 12th gen look questionable to buy. Let alone some 13th or 14th gen.
i3-2100. I mean it works. But even in Linux it was to easy to get a unpleasant experience watching RUclips as the core count chokes the performance here in 2023. And my I5-2400 is in my data backup server. But found a old 2500k system with a dead gigabyte mobo thrown into a corner long ago. So now I run a SFF old Lenovo desktop with a 2500k :) Makes the days gaming on the i5-2400 feel less painful having to enjoy a flawless Linux media center box today at basically no cost! Even now the 2500k is basically just a 2400 in this use case.
nice video. Doesnt nvidia drivers have problems with low end cpus? maybe a test with a amd card could help?
Not really, even a i3 6100 held back a RX 480 I had before in 2016.
@@takehirolol5962 its not about holding it back, but the driver from nvidia has a overshoot which makes the cpu even slower....
@@theplayerofus319 I have heard of that but 2nd gen is too old. This is not a low end CPU anymore, it's obsolete for modern gaming.
for a short while I had to use an i3 2100 + 12gb ddr3 + HD 7790 2gb (gcn2 so good dx12 and vulkan support). I was really enjoying GTA4 using dxvk that time lol, it ran so much better than my better PCs; mostly due to dxvk ofc
I gave away one of these and a i5-2400 and i5-2500 for free 2-3 years ago. No one should have to pay for a 2xxx series cpu. the i3 sat in a prebuilt. changed it to a 2500k and it was ok with a gtx660 at the time.
>2:18
>2:23
The samples are great :3
The i3 in the moment is a good CPU option but buying higher end will give far more longevity.
A modern i3 that is, at least 10th gen.
I got an i3-3240 for free when I bought an i7 once
I see in RTSS that the CPU is only pulling 30w max instead of it's rated 65?? Maybe that's the reason it performs so low?
depends on many things.
If you don't use it and the old owner didn't overclocked it for XXX hours, you may have a decent CPU for a very, very good price
I think Intel were just being conservative with the TDP. i3s at this time had no boost clock, so this just ran at 3.1GHz flat out. More power wouldn't have helped.
EDIT: to clarify, the TDP wasn't being limited in the BIOS or anything like that, and the power profile was set to maximum performance.
I used this CPU in my very first build. Christmas of 2012. God I was a cool 11 year old
If they are .10 £ a piece it would make for quite a cheap rendering farm ( buy 10 of them you got 20cores)
The electricity for it won't be cheap though
I mean it's going to surpass what you saved in what, 5 years ?
I mean it's going to surpass what you saved in what, 5 years ?
@@attilavs2 honestly probably just a year, 1st gen ryzen cpus are crazy cheap for much less power per core
Battlefield V runs so much better in Dx11, even my i7 960 can run a 64 player conquest without any significant frame drops/stuttering. Dx12 never worked for me, I've experienced huge frame drops on my 5600X/16GB/3060 Ti system too.
Imo i think running games at high setting at 1440p is super unrealistic for an i3-2100. You should have tried low-med settings at 1080p for a more realistic usecase/test
I had a i3 7100 laptop cpu with 12gb ram I don't remember speed and intel uhd 620 graphics is the i3 7100 laptop cpu good still?
2-core laptops are hopelessly obsolete.
Ive had a i3 2120 cpu for years
And only recently upgraded to a i5 3570
And im never going back
Still an awesome CPU for a HTPC, a thousand times better than any "smart TV"...
2200G.
In conclusion i3 these day are really good !
I upgrade my i3 6100 for a i3 12100F and i love this CPU i still have my 1050Ti but now my gpu bottleneck my cpu but i have now 100+ FPS on any game i play in high !!
Ooo interesting.. I say that as im going though my hardware atm and i have this cpu and a Biostart h61 mobo.. but for some god dam reason after post it just hangs on the windows load screen, and i mean the going to installs windows loads screen, so just after it loads the usb drive to load into the installer.. i cant even install windows 7 via dvd. i put it to the side for now to take a further look at later as i have so many pc projects going on. would you have any ideas? the mobo didn't even have a battery in it to reset as it was in storage
Perhaps 1080p instead of 1440? Not that I game in 1080 anymore but for a poor 10 yr old kid who's never played on pc before, this might be a super bargain..
I used to play on a i3-2100 no graphics card nothing, and oh it was hell.
Love that Sabretooth tho..
still using i3 2100 and I am using it for everyday tasks
Man my first usable PC had an i3 2130 8gb ram and gt 1030 2gb gddr5 on an old Dell vostro desktop motherboard
If it wasn't for the gpu I spent $25
they i3 12100f is a beast mine is running with a gtx 1650 (i know ppl hate it but i like the 1650 bc it’s my first gpu)
The best reccomendation I could give cpu wise is a i7-2600k
I3 12th gen is ridiculously good now
I got a 2400S out of a dumpster in an imac. Also a good 500GB drive.
Wait what was your GPU? If you were trying to run on the integrated Intel graphics I'm shocked it worked as well as it did
RTX 3070...
Okay but isn't the price per frame pretty good?
Still leagues better than the Sandybridge Celeron I have...somewhere. Honestly haven't paid any attention to it once I no longer needed it for BIOS updating - I keep on finding it and going "what CPU is this".
In the early days of DX 11 and older games, the 2c/4t was enough. Now? Nope. Dragon Quest XI destroyed an i3 6100 I had, then upgraded to Ryzen 5 2600 and now the 5600x.