My Core i3-2100 experience

[Skurge]

As some of you know.


I've been upgrading and downgrading quite a bit the last few months. From September 09 till May 2011 I've been using an unlocked Phenom II X4 3.5GHz (still going strong back home). from that point on I moved to a new town for work. To tide me over I got myself a Celeron 430 overclocked to 3Ghz. It was terrible. I could play GTR Evolution on it, but that was it. Just using windows 7 was a pain.


From there i got an E6600. It was a massive improvement. I could play a lot of games at good framerates. But whenever I was installing apps and playing music (lossless FLAC files) I'd get some stuttering, sometimes a lot. So I recently got the 2100, 2500K was out of my budget. Multitasking is so much better. I haven't run into a situation where my system has bogged down yet. Although I haven't haven't done anything super intensive on it yet. Like encoding while extracting a rar file or something.

Now the main reason why I got the new CPU. BF3. I thought I was sacrificing a lot performance getting and i3 instead of an i5. In MP where my E6600 couldn't even manage a barely playable 30fps. The 2100 gets 45-55fps most of the time and low 40s when the action gets heavy. What I'm trying to say is. I went for the cheap and quick option of getting an 2100 now instead of saving up and getting an 2500K later and I expected it to fall short of my old phenom x4 in the multitasking area. At the moment I'm completely satisfied with the 2100.

I was planning on getting a 2600K in January, but I think I will skip that and just get ivy bridge (a little disappointed with it TBH) or Piledriver if it isn't a steaming pile for gaming like bulldozer is (AMD Fan at heart).

All in all. Money well spent and I would recommend this CPU to anyone on a budget, while before I was convinced a dual core with HT, wasn't much better than a dual core.

 

[Gryz]

Thanks for the feedback. Good to hear you are happy with the i3-2100, compared to other CPUs.

A few weeks ago I was asked for advice for a PC for one of my friend's girlfriend. I usually recommend i5-2500. But as she won't be doing much gaming, and wants to keep prices down, I recommended a i3-2100 in stead. I haven't seen the system with my own eyes yet, but the couple told me they were very happy with the new machine. Good to hear I made a good recommendation.

 

[Kristijonas]

I found i3 2120 to be lagging (barely noticable) with these games:
Metro 2033
GTA 4
(These two games are well known for being worst-optimized)
And I'm sure it was because of the CPU because it lagged even with low settings with GTX 560Ti. But then again, after I updated my motherboard drivers lag decreased noticeably to being almost non-existant.

 

[Arachnotronic]

Yeah, I recently set up an i3 2100 system for someone. Paired with a Radeon 6790 1GB, it is a formidable setup.

 

[Skurge]

I found i3 2120 to be lagging (barely noticable) with these games:
Metro 2033
GTA 4
(These two games are well known for being worst-optimized)
And I'm sure it was because of the CPU because it lagged even with low settings with GTX 560Ti. But then again, after I updated my motherboard drivers lag decreased noticeably to being almost non-existant.

I still have GTA4. Haven't tried it yet. will give it a go and see how the CPU holds up.

 

[IntelUser2000]

Glad you like the i3-2100.

GTA4 scales well with CPU core/thread count, but performs not too well. The point of optimizing is to make it playable, it almost sounds like the developers made it scale well with multi-threads just for the sake of it.

 

[Fefster]

I found i3 2120 to be lagging (barely noticable) with these games:
Metro 2033
GTA 4
(These two games are well known for being worst-optimized)
And I'm sure it was because of the CPU because it lagged even with low settings with GTX 560Ti. But then again, after I updated my motherboard drivers lag decreased noticeably to being almost non-existant.

Can't really say anything about Metro,but my i3 2120 paired with an 6870 runs GTAIV maxed out smoothly with no lag whatsoever.

 

[Kristijonas]

It could be we just have different standards or experiences. When I first launched it, I too said "there's no lag", but my friend laughed at me. Then I downloaded new BIOS update (which was several updates) and performance really increased. Then I started to notice when it's laggy. Btw all benchmarks were always at 60+ fps with settings maxed, even though game never ran that smoothly when playing myself, so I think it only proves that the CPU was slightly lacking (because it's CPU has little to do in a benchmark, which is almost like a movie for it, just my guessing!)

 

[toyota]

Can't really say anything about Metro,but my i3 2120 paired with an 6870 runs GTAIV maxed out smoothly with no lag whatsoever.

I do not believe that at all. for one thing a 6870 only has 1gb of vram so you cant even max the game out anyway. even with my gtx570 2500k there are parts that drop into the high 20s and low 30s. and its mainly the cpu too as lowering to 800x600 at those spots does not really improve the framerate. your 2120 would have to be even slower in those spots.

 

[BD231]

I'm definitely eying that 3930k.

 

[Red Hawk]

It's not surprising that you get better performance out of a processor with newer architecture, higher clock speeds, and hyperthreading. The hyperthreading especially should help with multitasking.

Hyperthreading is Intel's real winner for low-end CPUs, IMHO. Raw CPU performance is nice, but the hyperthreading allows dual cores to match quad cores at certain tasks and keeps the price for such performance low. It's the one thing AMD has no real answer to, which is part of why they have to sell multi core processors at lower prices than Intel processors of the same core count. I think that AMD could have marketed Bulldozer's architecture as the answer to hyperthreading. Each Bulldozer module has two integer units but only one floating point unit, and (correct me if I'm wrong on this, never seen Bulldozer in action) each module can handle 2 threads at a time, thus each module is mark as being 2 cores. Instead, AMD could have marked each Bulldozer module as a single core and marketed Bulldozer as using "Double Core Technology" or some other phrase. If AMD had sold FX-8150s as quad core processors with special technology akin to hyperthreading, its reception might not have been so frosty.

The one thing that Sandy Bridge processors don't' do a good job with is overclocking, especially the low end ones. When overclocking is enabled, Sandy Bridge is great, the problem is only a select few SB processors are allowed to overclock at all, none of them in the low-end budget range.

 

[Fefster]

I do not believe that at all. for one thing a 6870 only has 1gb of vram so you cant even max the game out anyway. even with my gtx570 2500k there are parts that drop into the high 20s and low 30s. and its mainly the cpu too as lowering to 800x600 at those spots does not really improve the framerate. your 2120 would have to be even slower in those spots.

I'm not saying that i'm playing at a constant 60+ fps,my bad,being a longtime console gamer i find myself being content with much lower fps especially in games which do not require high fps to still deliver an enjoyable experience(i'm not playing MP).I obviously get framerate drops but they're quite rare and even if i drop to the low 20s a couple of times i don't really care since this is not a multiplayer shooter.Just to give you guys an example:just finished LA Noire everything at the highest settings@1080p and the game was averaging costantly 30fps (CPU usage never surpassed 60&#37,even tho the fps were low,they were still higher when compared to the ps3 version,plus it is much better looking on the PC.So to sum it up,for me:single player games 30fps+ avg is enough,competitive MP can't go lower than 60 avg.Also wanted to add than jumping from a c2d@2.4 to this CPU the performance difference in GTA is really impressive.

 

[toyota]

I'm not saying that i'm playing at a constant 60+ fps,my bad,being a longtime console gamer i find myself being content with much lower fps especially in games which do not require high fps to still deliver an enjoyable experience(i'm not playing MP).I obviously get framerate drops but they're quite rare and even if i drop to the low 20s a couple of times i don't really care since this is not a multiplayer shooter.Just to give you guys an example:just finished LA Noire everything at the highest settings@1080p and the game was averaging costantly 30fps (CPU usage never surpassed 60%),even tho the fps were low,they were still higher when compared to the ps3 version,plus it is much better looking on the PC.So to sum it up,for me:single player games 30fps+ avg is enough,competitive MP can't go lower than 60 avg.Also wanted to add than jumping from a c2d@2.4 to this CPU the performance difference in GTA is really impressive.

well dropping down into the 30s and 20s at times feels sluggish and is quite annoying to most people. 30fps for an average is not acceptable to me in any game that is action based. from what I understand LA Noire is capped at 30fps because of the motion capture they used. it should be the same for the PS3 as well.