THE BEST CHEAP GAMING CPU? I3 10100 Review

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So you are looking for the cheapest new CPU you can find for gaming – you look at AMD’s options well the Ryzen 3100 doesn’t seem to exist, nor the 3300X, you can’t buy the 4th gen APUs and even a 2200G is £135 right now. You could get a 1600 AF for £137, but that’s still pretty high and technically a generation or two old. So, team blue. Intel’s i3 10100 and 10100F can be had for at-or-around £100, offers 4 cores and 8 threads, and boost up to 4.3GHz. So seems like your best option, right? Well, Intel’s i5 10400F can be had for £135 and with that you get 6 cores and 12 threads, and the same 4.3GHz boost clocks. So, what do you buy? Well, lets test them out and see. But first, if you haven’t already, consider subscribing for more videos like this one every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. 

The i3 10100 is about as low as I’d recommend for gaming these days, 4 cores especially for modern games is becoming the minimum you’d want, plus for the same price as a B460 or H410 motherboard you’ll need for it, it’s pretty easy to recommend. It does have some drawbacks, beyond its immediate performance. For this generation, Intel were on the warpath to remove any and all features that aren’t absolutely necessary, and sell them back to you in “K” SKU products, including setting your memory speed to anything over their spec frequency, which for i3’s and i5’s is 2666MHz. So, despite me using a modest 3200MHz kit here, even setting the XMP profile on it still only ran at 2666MHz. You can circumvent that rule by using a Z490 board instead, but then you are spending more on your motherboard than you are your CPU and if you have spare cash it’s better to put that on a higher end CPU anyway.

One thing the H410 motherboard I’m using did let me do though was set the PL1 profile based on if I was using the (god awful) stock cooler, or an aftermarket AIO or tower cooler. If you pick the ‘Boxed Cooler’ option, it sets the PL1 and PL2 profiles to stock, which for the 10400F is 65W and 134W, but if you set it to tower or water cooler, it sets both to 255W. I set the same for the 10100 too.

So, enough talking, let’s look at some benchmarks. I’m testing with a 2080Ti to help isolate the CPU and see how well they actually perform. I’m playing at 1080p ultra settings, and I threw in a ‘simulated’ Ryzen 5600X, a 5900X with a full CCX disabled, as a reference.

In Watchdogs Legion, the 10100 still performs reasonably well, although is around 20% slower than the 10400F which while it does have a lower 1% low number, is within margin of error of the 6 core Ryzen on the average. 

COD Modern Warfare is a lot closer, with the 10400F being just 5% faster than the 10100, meaning realistically you won’t notice that difference. 

But in Cyberpunk, that’s a very different story. In my previous testing, Cyberpunk is an incredibly CPU heavy game. It struggles on slower, lower core chips, and that’s obvious here. With 93FPS on the 6 core Ryzen, then just 75FPS on the 10400F, and a further drop to 56FPS on the 10100, that’s a big difference. The i5 is 35% faster than the i3, with the Ryzen chip being a further 25% than the i5. Mental.

Fortnite is a return to normal, with slight improvements going from the i3 to i5, and to 5th gen Ryzen. It’s definitely not as drastic, and at over 180FPS certainly not a noticeable change.

So, the i3 is definitely the slowest, but still playable. The i5 might be a better buy but for just £100 it’s hard to argue. Video over, right? Well, the thing is you won’t be playing with a 2080Ti. If you spending this little on a CPU, you probably don’t have 600-800 to spend on a used 2080Ti (pretending the GPU market isn’t absolute chaos). At most you are probably running RTX 2060 level graphics, so I thought I’d run all those benchmarks again, but with a 2060. 

When using the 2060, it’s clear the GPU becomes the bottleneck as all three chips are within margin of error of each other. You wouldn’t see much if any difference between these in game.

COD is the same, within 0.2 FPS average. Seriously. That’s it.

Cyberpunk does still show a difference, not in average this time, but in the 1% lows. Yes, they all run pretty much the same average, but the 10100 dips significantly lower than either the i5 or Ryzen chip, noticeably so. You would likely feel that difference, if slightly.

And in Fortnite it’s back to within margin of error really. 

So with a more… limiting… GPU, the 10100 is a much more viable option. Sure, the 10400F especially in CPU heavy games like Cyberpunk does provide a better playing experience but for most games that are GPU bound it’s pretty close. There is one advantage the i5 has over the 10100 though, which is productivity performance. 

In Cinebench Single Threaded you can see why the 10100 was so close to the 10400F in games, it’s basically the same chip with a few extra cores. 

But in multi threaded you can see the difference. The 10400F is 50% faster than the 10100, as you’d expect it to be with 50% more cores and threads.

That’s reflected in the Blender figures too, with the 10400F being 50% faster in the BMW render test, a pretty meaningful amount of time difference too. 

And lastly it’s the same again with Gooseberry, but with an even bigger time difference. The 10100 took over 36 minutes whereas the 10400F took just over 24 minutes. 

All that performance difference translates to streaming too. I’ve tested the 10400F for streaming before and it did ok, if not amazingly. But apply that 33% less cores to the 10100 and it’s going to be pretty bad. You might still be ok streaming using your GPU encoder, but if you are streaming through a program like OBS it still takes some CPU power to run that and it might end up being less than ideal for both you and your viewers if you had the 10100. 

So, for £10-30 more depending if you buy the 10100 or 10100F, the 10400F seems like an amazing option. Especially if you plan on streaming or say editing videos, get the 10400F. It’s worth it. But, if you want the cheapest new gaming CPU right now, the 10100(F) is your best choice. Especially with a mid level GPU, you are going to have a great time with it, and worst case you can always upgrade it later anyway.