Intel Core i5-8600K vs Intel Core i3-12100F

Core i5-8600K vs Core i3-12100F specs and performance

In our benchmarks, the Core i3-12100F beats the Core i5-8600K in overall performance. Furthermore, our gaming benchmark shows that it also outperforms the Core i5-8600K in all gaming tests too.

With info from our database, we find that the Core i5-8600K has significantly more cores with 6 cores whereas the Core i3-12100F has 4 cores. Despite this, the Core i3-12100F has more threads than the Core i5-8600K. These CPUs have different clock speeds. Indeed, the Core i5-8600K has a slightly higher clock speed compared to the Core i3-12100F. In addition, both chips have the same turbo speed. The Core i3-12100F outputs less heat than Core i5-8600K thanks to a 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. For instance, the Core i5-8600K has the same number of threads as cores. This means the the CPU does not support hyperthreading.