Intel Core i3-12100 and i5-12400 review: Fast, affordable, and hard to criticize

Enlarge / Intel's 12th-gen Core i3 and i5 CPUs are good options if you want good performance but need to save money. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

It hasn't been a great time to build a computer on a budget. Some of that is due to ongoing supply issues and a particularly nasty GPU shortage (albeit one that may be very gradually easing). And some of it is because the products on offer haven't improved much lately—Intel's best budget and midrange processors were stuck with an aging architecture because of manufacturing problems, and AMD chose to focus on high-end products instead.

In anticipation of AMD's new sub-$200 processors, today we're looking at a pair of Intel's best sub-$200 processors in years. The Core i5-12400 ($210 with a GPU, $180-ish without one) is a six-core processor that offers great performance for budget-minded gaming PCs and anyone who wants to do light photo and video editing work without spending tons of money. And the Core i3-12100 (around $150 with a GPU or $120 without) is a quad-core chip that can handle games when paired with a GPU but is ideally suited for browsing, office work and schoolwork, video calls, and anything else you might want from a basic desktop in a home office setup.

Performance and power efficiency

We're primarily comparing the Core i3-12100 and Core i5-12400 to their immediate predecessors: the Core i3-10100, the Core i5-10400, and the Core i5-11400. We also threw in the Ryzen 5 3600 as a comparison point, which used to sell for $200 but hasn't been widely available at that price for a while; comparisons to the newer Ryzen 5 5500 and 5600 CPUs will follow after those chips have been released.

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