4 ms·

This a pretty nice part and dominates in what I would expect its target market to use (aka office desktop & gaming). Its really a shame its so hard to pick this

This a pretty nice part and dominates in what I would expect its target market to use (aka office desktop & gaming). Its really a shame its so hard to pick this out from all the benchmark cases in this article where its compared against processors that cost > 2x and have 2x the cores in a multithreaded tests. For desktop (not workstation) use, ST perf is probably the number one dictator of perceived perf. Then if it has enough cores to run most games without being core bound/etc then its a winner. These i3's have been pretty nice parts for the last half dozen+ generations, I find it hard to personally justify more except for workstation purposes. AKA unless your doing some kind of heavy science/engineering/movie editing/etc style workload you won't actually notice much benifit moving to a more costly machine. Put another way, either do the top of the line i9/ryzen 9, or stick to these high clock rate low core count machines. Until they removed ECC some of the i3 parts with ECC were absolutely fantastic home/microserver parts too.

Retric 5y ago
The issue with i3’s is performance improvements have gotten slow enough you might as well get a faster chip and upgrade less frequently. It’s not just the cost of the chip and motherboard, simply the hassle of swapping systems pushes waiting longer.
- howinteresting 5y ago
  Alder Lake seems to blow past previous generations though.
- StillBored 5y ago
  But, there aren't really "faster" processors for desktop use unless you pick the 5Ghz ones which are definitely pretty far into the diminishing returns region. When you plot single thread perf vs freq, its not linear so those 4.8Ghz cores are only marginally faster at best, and some of the lower end i5's/etc are probably slower for any number of desktop tasks (web browsing/etc) vs the 12300. Anyway, your completely right, for me the largest "cost" is the hundreds of hours of program install, OS tweaking/etc i've put into the current machine over the span of a few years. MS makes it really hard to get away with just swapping motherboards now as you end up calling them to reactivate windows on the new machine (and its always a crapshoot as its basically licensed to the motherboard no the user). There was a time when I was constantly rotating parts in/out of my PC's but that stopped in the late XP timeframe due to MS being a PITA. So, now outside of ram/gpu/SSD upgrades they tend to remain fairly static. This one is pushing 6 years old at this point.
  - iggldiggl 5y ago
    > its basically licensed to the motherboard no the user You're right that you have to go through the reactivation dance, but doesn't that particular limitation apply only to OEM licenses that are included with a ready-built PC?
    - Macha 5y ago
      You can buy Windows OEM in box through retailers or MSPs, and I'm not just talking G2A style grey markets. e.g. newegg: https://www.newegg.com/microsoft-windows-11-pro/p/N82E16832350882?Description=windows%2011&cm_re=windows_11-_-32-350-882-_-Product&quicklink=true https://www.newegg.com/microsoft-windows-11-pro/p/N82E168323... These are effectively locked to the a limited number of hardware changes per time period before they force you to talk to someone at microsoft to transfer the license to new hardware. The alternative is to buy a Windows license from Microsoft direct, but the only direct option they offer to consumers anymore is an account-bound license, so you'll need to set up with a Microsoft account for initial activation on new hardware (of course, if recent Insiders builds are any indication, soon everyone will).
Macha 5y ago
As the article points out, AMD has largely vacated that market. Stuff like the 1600AF or 3300X were rather poorly stocked even when they were sold and now AMD has claimed the more profitable performance segment of the DIY market don't feel the need to complete downmarket when they could be using their fab time to make epyc cpus and reestablish a foothold in the server market, or GPUs with their massive price inflation. This might change now Intel is competitive again, or if the shortages ease so they can't simply sell a GPU or server CPU by just having one to sell, but it won't be instant. Which leaves basically the only other CPU active in that price bracket as the 11400

Retric 5y ago

The issue with i3’s is performance improvements have gotten slow enough you might as well get a faster chip and upgrade less frequently. It’s not just the cost of the chip and motherboard, simply the hassle of swapping systems pushes waiting longer.

howinteresting 5y ago
Alder Lake seems to blow past previous generations though.
StillBored 5y ago
But, there aren't really "faster" processors for desktop use unless you pick the 5Ghz ones which are definitely pretty far into the diminishing returns region. When you plot single thread perf vs freq, its not linear so those 4.8Ghz cores are only marginally faster at best, and some of the lower end i5's/etc are probably slower for any number of desktop tasks (web browsing/etc) vs the 12300. Anyway, your completely right, for me the largest "cost" is the hundreds of hours of program install, OS tweaking/etc i've put into the current machine over the span of a few years. MS makes it really hard to get away with just swapping motherboards now as you end up calling them to reactivate windows on the new machine (and its always a crapshoot as its basically licensed to the motherboard no the user). There was a time when I was constantly rotating parts in/out of my PC's but that stopped in the late XP timeframe due to MS being a PITA. So, now outside of ram/gpu/SSD upgrades they tend to remain fairly static. This one is pushing 6 years old at this point.
- iggldiggl 5y ago
  > its basically licensed to the motherboard no the user You're right that you have to go through the reactivation dance, but doesn't that particular limitation apply only to OEM licenses that are included with a ready-built PC?
  - Macha 5y ago
    You can buy Windows OEM in box through retailers or MSPs, and I'm not just talking G2A style grey markets. e.g. newegg: https://www.newegg.com/microsoft-windows-11-pro/p/N82E16832350882?Description=windows%2011&cm_re=windows_11-_-32-350-882-_-Product&quicklink=true https://www.newegg.com/microsoft-windows-11-pro/p/N82E168323... These are effectively locked to the a limited number of hardware changes per time period before they force you to talk to someone at microsoft to transfer the license to new hardware. The alternative is to buy a Windows license from Microsoft direct, but the only direct option they offer to consumers anymore is an account-bound license, so you'll need to set up with a Microsoft account for initial activation on new hardware (of course, if recent Insiders builds are any indication, soon everyone will).

Macha 5y ago

As the article points out, AMD has largely vacated that market. Stuff like the 1600AF or 3300X were rather poorly stocked even when they were sold and now AMD has claimed the more profitable performance segment of the DIY market don't feel the need to complete downmarket when they could be using their fab time to make epyc cpus and reestablish a foothold in the server market, or GPUs with their massive price inflation. This might change now Intel is competitive again, or if the shortages ease so they can't simply sell a GPU or server CPU by just having one to sell, but it won't be instant. Which leaves basically the only other CPU active in that price bracket as the 11400