Intel Core i3-2120 vs Intel Core i5-2430M

Core i3-2120 vs Core i5-2430M specs and performance

According to the hardwareDB Benchmark tool, the Core i3-2120 is faster than the Core i5-2430M. Furthermore, our gaming benchmark shows that it also outperforms the Core i5-2430M in all gaming tests too.

When comparing these CPUs we notice that they have the same number of cores and the same number of threads. With our hardware info, we find that the Core i3-2120 has a slightly higher clock speed than the Core i5-2430M. The Core i5-2430M outputs less heat than Core i3-2120 thanks to a significantly lower TDP. This measures the amount of heat they output and can be used to estimate power consumption.

Modern CPUs generally have more logical cores than physical cores, this means that each core is split into multiple virtual cores, improving efficiency for parallel workloads. Indeed, the Core i3-2120 has more threads than cores. Each physical core is split into multiple threads.