Intel Core i3 8100: 3.6GHz Quad-Core With UHD Graphics For Less Than $120 USD

If you are on a tight budget and haven't upgraded your CPU in a few generations, the Core i3 8100 is a very competent offering at around $120 USD. This 3.6GHz quad-core CPU performed very well in our tests: almost always faster than the Ryzen 3 1300X, generally on par or beating a Core i5 Skylake, and overall delivering good performance as we've seen already out of the i5-8400 and i7-8700K with these new elevated core counts.

The pricing is quite good and the UHD Graphics 630 are sufficient if just using it as a desktop/office-type system. So all in all it's a good deal with the Core i3 8100 for a budget system. The modern features of the Z370 chipset will also keep your system current for several years to come. Additionally, the 65 Watt TDP makes the i3-8100 sufficient for use in a small form factor PC.

With regards to Linux compatibility, as with the other Coffee Lake processors, right now you need to set the "i915.alpha_support=1" to enable the UHD Graphics support and as well there isn't yet any Coffee Lake support out-of-the-box in Beignet for OpenCL but it can be easily patched in. Aside from that, the support is good and there is also working per-core and package temperature reporting via the cputemp driver.

Some basic load temperature data within this result file.

The Core i3 8100 can currently be found in-stock from NewEgg.com for $119 USD.

To see how your own Linux system(s) compare to the 30 systems featured in this comparison, install the Phoronix Test Suite and run phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1710061-TY-COFFEEALL15.