Intel Core i3-10105 - Review 2022 - PCMag Australia
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When Intel released its 11th Generation "Rocket Lake" processors in 2021, the company launched only Core i5, Core i7, and Core i9 models for the desktop market. If you wanted to build a lower-end system, the best you could do with Team Blue's newest-generation chips was "Comet Lake Refresh," a short series of slightly tweaked 10th Generation Core i3 and Pentium models. These processors are mildly upclocked versions of original 10th Generation Comet Lake parts, on Intel's same LGA 1200 socket. Now that lower-end 12th Generation "Alder Lake" CPUs are coming to market, so has begun the sunset on LGA 1200. We got our hands on one of the moderate-priced Core i3 Refresh models, the Core i3-10105 ($122), to see what kind of performance you can expect from this low-cost chip as socket LGA 1200 becomes a value play and gives way to Alder Lake's LGA 1700. Spoiler? It's competent enough, if not a budget chip to make the heart race, mostly saved by two facts: (1) that it has integrated graphics, and (2) that you can actually buy it.
A 'Comet' That Flies With 'Rockets'As a refreshed part, the Core i3-10105 is identical in almost every detail to its direct predecessor in the original 10th Generation Core/Comet Lake lineup, the Core i3-10100. Both are LGA 1200 processors equipped with four Hyper-Threading-enabled CPU cores, supporting up to eight concurrent processing threads. The difference: The Core i3-10105 is clocked ever so slightly higher, with a base clock of 3.7GHz and a peak Turbo Boost of 4.4GHz, which is 100MHz faster than the Core i3-10100 on both accounts.
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The Core i3-10105 and the Core i3-10100 both come with Intel’s UHD Graphics 630 integrated graphics processor (IGP) built in. This graphics solution employs 24 EUs that operate at up to 1.1GHz. We’ve tested this IGP numerous times in the past, and we will again today; expect it to perform well enough in older game titles but fall short for anything that’s too new and graphically intense. This IGP is intended mainly for non-gaming tasks like watching videos and surfing the web, and it works perfectly fine for that. (Take a look at our deeper dive into desktop-CPU IGP performance from a few months back.)
Official memory support with the Core i3-10105 is limited to dual-channel DDR4 RAM clocked at up to 2,666MHz, up to 128GB or the lower peak amount supported by your motherboard. With the right RAM and motherboard, you should be able to run your RAM faster than this with the Core i3-10105, but with a motherboard based on the H410 or H510 chipset, you won’t be able to overcome this limitation.
As for how it's sold: The Core i3-10105 is available in a variety of OEM systems, as well as at retail. (We sourced our sample from a Dell Inspiron Desktop 3891 we reviewed.) Intel also sells a slightly cheaper Core i3-10105F variant that has the IGP disabled, for folks who have a video card to pair with this chip. If you buy the chip as a retail part, it comes with Intel's basic heatsink/fan assembly included for use with an LGA 1200 motherboard.
Testing the Core i3-10105: Budget Blues for Team Blue?We ran the Core i3-10105 through our standard range of CPU benchmarks. We recently updated the range of tests we use for testing CPUs, so not every CPU we’ve reviewed in the past was an option for comparison. We continued to use most of the same hardware for testing including an Asus ROG Maximus XII Hero (Wi-Fi) Z490 motherboard with 16GB of G.Skill RAM clocked at 3,000MHz. An Intel-branded SATA SSD was used for the primary boot drive, and a secondary ADATA M.2 SATA drive was used for additional storage. The system was built out inside of ADATA's XPG Invader chassis with a Deepcool GamerStorm Captain 240 EX 240mm water cooler, and a 750-watt Corsair power supply.
The main change in our supporting-hardware lineup is the graphics card. We are now using an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti for dedicated-card graphics benchmarks instead of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti we used previously. All processors listed here were tested with the RTX 3080 Ti to ensure an even playing field. We ran AMD’s closest competitor to the Core i3-10105, the Ryzen 3 3100, through this series of tests, as well as several Core i5 and Ryzen 5 processors...
Note: The AMD chips ending in "G" have integrated graphics. We've also included a few Core i7 and Ryzen 7 chips in the results below for perspective, though they, of course, are much pricier.
CPU PerformanceNo surprise, but the Core i3-10105 turned in the lowest results of this group in most tests we ran. The Core i5 and i7 processors, and the Ryzen 5 and 7, have extra cores that give them a decisive advantage, which makes the Ryzen 3 3100 the only real competition in this list.
Unfortunately for Intel, in some of these tests the Core i3-10105 is significantly slower than the Ryzen 3 3100. In Handbrake, the Core i3-10105 took a full six minutes longer to finish the test render task than the Ryzen 3 3100. The Core i3 was slower in our Cinebench, Geekbench, 7-Zip, and Blender trials, by smaller relative amounts.
Intel’s Core i3-10105 did manage to pull ahead of the Ryzen 3 3100 in a few tests, but by a small margin where it did. It was slightly faster when running the Puget Systems PugetBench for Adobe Premiere Pro 15 CC, and its biggest win came while running POV-Ray.
Graphics PerformanceWe then moved to our dedicated-graphics testing, with the Core i3 paired with our discrete GeForce RTX 3080 Ti card. In these gaming tests, the difference between the Core i3-10105 and the Ryzen 3 3100 narrowed considerably, with both processors coming close to tying in many of our synthetic and game tests. In most of the game tests, the Ryzen 3 3100 came out ahead, but by a margin of only 1 to 3 frames per second in most games...
After that, we yanked the GeForce card and tested the integrated graphics performance. If anything, it's a bit worse than we expected to see. Intel equipped many of its 10th and 11th Generation chips with the same UHD Graphics 630 IGP, which has given us plenty of opportunities to test this UHD Graphics silicon before. It’s the same IGP that’s found inside of the Core i5-10600K in the charts below...
The 11th Generation (Rocket Lake) Core i7-11700K and the Core i5-11600K, for example, are on Intel's Iris Xe UHD Graphics 750, and that newer Intel IGP shines through. Though all of these chips have more processing power than the Core i3-10105 and were expected to outperform it, we didn’t expect the performance gap to be quite as large as it is. The Ryzen "G" chips with on-chip Radeon graphics, meanwhile, blow it away, though they are much pricier, with the 5600G starting at more than double the price of our i3.
Note that the 11th Generation Core i7-11700K and Core i5-11600K achieved nearly double the performance of the Core i3-10105 in the IGP tests, showing the superiority of the newer Iris Xe IGP solution and what budget buyers missed out on when Intel didn't release any truly budget-minded Rocket Lake desktop chips with Iris Xe. The Core i5-10600K’s performance lead over the Core i3 is closer to what we were anticipating.
Overall, this test set shows the Core i3-10105 delivers only modest IGP performance, even though that doesn’t necessarily mean it's unusable. Don’t plan to rely on it with modern games, unless you’ve always wanted to see a slideshow of your latest AAA titles. But if you aren’t gaming, or you are running games from more than a few (think six or more) years ago, it should work reasonably well.
Motherboards and Pricing: The Platform ProblemOverall, the desirability of the Core i3-10105 against the Ryzen 3 3100 is reflected in the real-world pricing and availability of each. In these silicon-strapped times, you can find a Core i3-10105, as well as Intel's other Comet Lake Refresh chips, pretty readily at their list prices. But you'll really have to hunt for the Ryzen 3 3100 or the even better Ryzen 3 3300X (not retested here, and now practically unobtanium near its list price). Still, while this Core i3 is slower in many tests, it loses by a small margin to the 3100 where it does. It would be a pretty even fight if not for two other factors, both price-related.
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The Core i3-10105 is compatible with LGA 1200 motherboards, the most affordable of which will set you back roughly $80 to $90. The competing Ryzen 3 3100 is a socket AM4 processor that’s compatible with any AMD 400- or 500-series chipset board, the most affordable of which is only about $60 to $70.
Thus, you’ll likely pay more for a Core i3-10105 processor in an "overall platform" sense than for a Ryzen 3 3100, if you actually luck into one of the AMD chips at its MSRP. The Core i3-10105 is priced at $122, with the Ryzen 3 3100 priced lower at $99. This makes the regular cost of ownership for the slower Core i3-10105 system about $40 more than the faster AMD build, assuming list prices and the cheapest motherboards.
Today's actual market conditions have made this comparison much less dire for Intel, though, with the Core i3-10105 selling regularly for $120 to $125, and the Ryzen 3 3100 selling for $150 and up...where you can even find it! But this still gives the faster AMD system a $10 to $15 advantage in price when you factor in the cheapest motherboards, in addition to the Ryzen 3 having slightly better performance. This doesn’t take into consideration that LGA 1200 is now a dead platform (the new 12th Generation Alder Lake chips use a whole new socket), whereas new AM4 processors could in theory be released for future upgrades, if you opted for AMD.
Now there is one big elephant in the room, and the decider in favor of Intel for some buyers: the IGP. This math so far all assumes you will pair your CPU with a video card you own, and video cards are far far from cheap these days. The Ryzen 3 3100 and 3300X lack an IGP, whereas the Core i3-10105 has that cost-saving UHD Graphics aboard. AMD IGP-equipped Ryzens start around $250, if you ignore the now-old Ryzen 3 3200G, which sells for inflated prices, where you can find it at all.
Verdict: Go Ryzen, If You Can Card ItWeighing this chip in today's market is tough. Given the Core i3-10105’s lackluster performance against its (theoretically) lower-priced Ryzen 3 competition, and the higher cost of ownership for the LGA 1200 platform, the Core i3-10105 is a lukewarm recommend...unless you are decidedly looking to go without a graphics card. Going by our test results, you will save money and get better performance by opting for a Ryzen 3 3100 over a Core i3-10105, assuming you own a satisfactory video card and can find the Ryzen 3 cheap enough. But those are two big "ifs."
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All of this could change as market pressures cause prices to fluctuate. Intel's new Alder Lake could exert downward pressure—perhaps!—on the pricing of the chips and boards below it. If the price on a Core i3-10105 drops a bit more, or if you find an excellent deal on an LGA 1200 motherboard, then the Core i3-10105 could become a more worthwhile option to consider for a budget system. But cheaper Alder Lake boards are coming, and the i3-10105's window of attraction is closing fast. For now, you'll likely want to go Ryzen if you can, or look at your Alder Lake options as those budget models and boards come online.