Intel Core i3-9100

A decent chip, but we prefer its cheaper 9100F incarnation for low-cost gaming PCs

SCORE

PRICE £97 (£117 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk

The i3-9100 is the cheapest Intel CPU here, which means a modest spec. It’s a quad-core Coffee Lake chip with no multithreading, and it has base and boost speeds of 3.6GHz and 4.2GHz. There’s not enough cash for much cache, with 6MB of L3, but note that it includes graphics via Intel’s UHD Graphics 630 integrated core.

It has plenty of rivals. If you want integrated graphics, the Ryzen 3 3200G and Ryzen 5 3400G sit either side; if that isn’t important, the Ryzen 3 3100 and 3300X offer competitive prices.

There’s another CPU to consider, though: the Core i3-9100F. That part drops the integrated graphics core, and the price drops dramatically to £72 – undercutting every other chip here.

The i3-9100’s processing cores are underwhelming. In our benchmarks, its overall score of 122 was only ahead of the Ryzen 3 3200G, and it could only beat

AMD’s older APUs in single-core tests. In almost all application tests, the Zen 2 Ryzen 3 chips and pricier i5-9400F are far faster.

The Core i3’s integrated GPU is poor – unable to keep up with either AMD APU. When it comes to gaming with a discrete GPU, though, the Intel is better, helping PCs deliver better minimum and average frame rates than any competing AMD chip.

If you’re building a budget gaming PC, the i3-9100 is a decent choice – cheaper and faster than its rivals if you opt for the £72 9100F variant. For everyday computing, though, the Ryzen 3 chips offer more speed.

Intel’s cheapest Core i5 chip only costs £150, which means it faces strong competition from a bevy of AMD parts – such as the new £120 Ryzen 3 3300X and the Ryzen 5 3600, which costs £180.

It’s a tough position for Intel’s CPU, and this part only has a middling spec – six cores, no multithreading, and it’s clocked to 2.9GHz (base) and 4.1GHz (turbo). Both AMD chips outpace those figures.

The “F” suffix means it has no integrated graphics core, and that makes it better value. The conventional Core i5-9400 still costs £192, which is far too expensive when compared to other mid-range options.

The i5-9400F may have a middling spec on paper, but there are several areas where this CPU impresses. Its overall score of 180 in our benchmarks is virtually identical to the AMD Ryzen 3 3300X. It traded blows with AMD’s chip elsewhere– it was slightly faster in Geekbench, Y-Cruncher and Blender’s multicore tests, but fell behind in Cinebench, Photoshop, Premiere Pro and in most single-threaded benchmarks.

Intel’s chip is faster in gaming. Its 3DMark Time Spy result of 11,258 was far better than the AMD part, and its frame rates in our selection of games were consistently quicker.

The i5-9400F makes a good basis for a budget gaming PC, but the AMD Ryzen 3 3300X ( see p84) is not ruinously slow in games – and its lower price and more consistent performance makes the Ryzen part a better all-rounder.

The i5-9600K has been one of the most popular chips around for everyday PCs and gaming rigs since its release in 2018, but it looks long in the tooth now that its successor has arrived. It’s still on sale, though, and its £225 price makes it far cheaper than the i5-10600K. Plus, it has the internal grunt to cope with day-to-day tasks and mainstream gaming.

The i5-9600K relies on the older Coffee Lake architecture. Its base and boost speeds of 3.7GHz and 4.6GHz still look imposing, but its six cores aren’t multithreaded while its 9MB allocation of L3 cache is stingy for a chip this expensive.

The i5-9600K may have been a contender on release, but its performance pales in comparison to newer silicon. The AMD Ryzen 3 3600X is faster in virtually every benchmark test, including almost every single-core run (Intel’s traditional advantage). The AMD chip is quicker in several gaming tests, too.

It doesn’t help the 9600K’s cause that the cheaper Core i5-9400F also proved faster in games, while the affordable Ryzen 5 3600 is quicker than the i5-9600K in most of the multicore productivity tools.

No matter what you need to do with your CPU, newer alternatives are better than the i5-9600K: the cheaper AMD Ryzen 5 3600 and 3600X offer more speed in a multitude of workloads, for instance, and even in some games. The i5-9600K may have once been popular, but there’s no place for it in new PCs.