Intel Core i5-11500 vs Intel Core i3-12100

Core i5-11500 vs Core i3-12100 benchmarks

Our benchmark analysis concludes that the Core i3-12100 performs better than the Core i5-11500. Furthermore, our gaming benchmark shows that it also outperforms the Core i5-11500 in all gaming tests too.

In terms of the number of cores of each of these CPUs, the Core i5-11500 has significantly more cores than the Core i3-12100. Indeed, the Core i5-11500 has 6 cores compared to 4 cores found in the Core i3-12100. It also has more threads than the Core i3-12100. With our hardware info, we find that the Core i3-12100 has a slightly higher clock speed than the Core i5-11500. Despite this, the Core i5-11500 has a slightly higher turbo speed. The Core i3-12100 outputs less heat than Core i5-11500 thanks to a slightly 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 i5-11500 has more threads than cores. Each physical core is split into multiple threads.