The Intel Core i3-13100F Review: Finding Value in Intel's Cheapest Core Chip

CPU Benchmark Performance: Rendering And Encoding

Rendering tests, compared to others, are often a little more simple to digest and automate. All the tests put out some sort of score or time, usually in an obtainable way that makes it fairly easy to extract. These tests are some of the most strenuous in our list, due to the highly threaded nature of rendering and ray-tracing, and can draw a lot of power.

If a system is not properly configured to deal with the thermal requirements of the processor, the rendering benchmarks are where it would show most easily as the frequency drops over a sustained period of time. Most benchmarks in this case are re-run several times, and the key to this is having an appropriate idle/wait time between benchmarks to allow for temperatures to normalize from the last test.

One of the interesting elements of modern processors is encoding performance. This covers two main areas: encryption/decryption for secure data transfer, and video transcoding from one video format to another.

In the encrypt/decrypt scenario, how data is transferred and by what mechanism is pertinent to on-the-fly encryption of sensitive data - a process by which more modern devices are leaning to for software security.

We are using DDR5-4800 memory on the Intel Core i3-13100F as per the JEDEC specifications. Other recent chips, such as Intel's 13th/12th Gen Core series and Ryzen 7000 processors, are also tested at the rated JEDEC specifications. We tested the aforementioned platforms with the following settings:

• DDR5-5600B CL46 - Intel 13th Gen
• DDR5-5200 CL44 - Ryzen 7000
• DDR5-4800 (B) CL40 - Intel 12th Gen
• DDR5-4800 (B) CL40 - Intel 13th Gen Core i3 series

All other CPUs such as Ryzen 5000 and 3000 were tested at the relevant JEDEC settings as per the processor's individual memory support with DDR4.

Rendering

Among our quad core chips, the i3-13100F is unsurprisingly in good standing, though it does fall behind the i3-12300 more often than would expect. Otherwise, in these tests cores and frequency are (almost) everything, illustrating the performance limitations of a quad core CPU in an age where consumer chips ship with upwards of 24 of the things.

Encoding

Looking at encoding performance, we see a similar trend as we did with our simulation and rendering benchmarks; having just four cores puts a cap on absolute performance versus more expensive chips with additional CPU cores. It's clear that having four cores shows limitations in compute tasks, but with performance very closely matched with the Core i3-12300, the Core i3-13100F does a good job all things considered.