Intel Core i3 Coffee Lake Refresh i3-9100F OEM (CM8068403358820)

From outcasts to heroes

In the Intel family, Core i3 processors have always been an unloved child, on which they save money from the heart: either they cut the cores, then they don’t add multithreading, or they cut the turbo boost. But the hand of the market put everything in its place, against the background of the new Ryzen, no one was interested in such rubbish, and the Core i3 line gradually began its ascent. And now, a year after its debut, the Core i3 9100F can be safely called the king of inexpensive gaming PCs.

The best processor for a low-cost gaming PC

Why is he good? At the cost. Intel initially decided to shock the market with low prices, effectively killing most of the previous generation of processors. For an OEM version without a cooler and an integrated video core, they are now asking for a little more than $80. Agree, the price is impressive even by the standards of democratic ryzens. At the same time, buyers are not faced with any compromises: the Core i3 9100F has four full-fledged cores and an honest turbo boost up to 4.2 GHz, it also has an acceptable 6 MB of third-level cache and modest power consumption. Considering that the bottleneck in today's games is the graphics card, not the processor, the Core i3 9100F is an perfect candidate for a low-cost gaming PC.

There may be problems with the upgrade in the future

The Core i3 9100F has only one minus and it is connected just with the upgrade. If you buy a 9th generation stone that runs on an LGA 1151 v2 socket, you will not be able to upgrade to the 10th or future 11th generation simply because Intel has moved to the new socket 1200. Therefore, the scope for upgrading will be limited to Coffee Lake processor families and Coffee Lake Refresh. Core i5 9600KF or Core i7 9700F. It depends on what prices will be by that time and what of this will generally be on the market.