Intel Core i3-12100 vs Intel Core i9-12900K

Core i3-12100 vs Core i9-12900K benchmarks

In our benchmarks, the Core i9-12900K beats the Core i3-12100 in overall performance. Furthermore, our gaming benchmark shows that it also outperforms the Core i3-12100 in all gaming tests too.

With info from our database, we find that the Core i9-12900K has significantly more cores with 16 cores whereas the Core i3-12100 has 4 cores. It also has more threads than the Core i3-12100. Our comparison shows that the Core i3-12100 has a slightly higher clock speed compared to the Core i9-12900K. Despite this, the Core i9-12900K has a slightly higher turbo speed. A Core i3-12100 CPU outputs less heat than a Core i9-12900K CPU because of its significantly lower TDP. This measures the amount of heat they output and can be used to estimate power consumption.

The more cores a CPU has, the better the overall performance will be in parallel workloads such as multitasking. Many CPUs have more threads than cores, this means that each physical core is split into multiple logical cores, making them more efficient. Indeed, the Core i3-12100 has more threads than cores. Each physical core is split into multiple threads.