Gadgetory

hi and welcome back to hardware unboxed I'm your host Matt and today we'll be taking a look at Intel's new core i3 6100 budget skylake processor already three months has passed since Intel releases later CPU microarchitecture codename skylake leading the charge was the core i7 6700 K costing 370 dollars and the more affordable Core i5 6600 K at 270 since then Intel has quietly released a few locked core i7 and Core i5 skylake processors the cheapest of which is the core i5 6400 at the cost of $190 so those of you keen to run intel's most efficient architecture today but can't afford to drop $200 on the cpu the upcoming core i3 and pentium range is likely of greater interest in stark contrast to the previous skylake launch Intel isn't going to make a big deal out of these more affordable parts rather they'll just slowly appear on the market so far Intel's announced three standard power desktop core i3 parts which include the 6160 360 320 the core i3 6100 is as expected the cheapest of the three with an MSRP of 117 dollars the 6300 features of $139 MSRP and there 6320 with a $148 MSRP each of these processors are separated by a 100 megahertz frequency with the 6100 starting at a rather high 3.7 gigahertz clock speed as seen previously the core i3 range doesn't support turbo boost although it does come with hyper threading enabled for a total of 4 threads other than the minor change in frequency the only other difference is the l3 cache size which has been reduced to 3 megabytes for the 6100 while the 60 263 twins you both get a larger 4 megabyte cache they each come with the Intel HD graphics 530 working it between 350 and 1150 megahertz and a Raider for 51 Watts TDP like the Core i5 and core i7 skylake processors these core i3 models use the LGA 1151 socket depending on the motherboard can support either ddr3 or ddr4 memory specs I'd the core Oh 361 hundreds very similar to the house well based core i3 4170 both operate at 3.7 gigahertz and feature three megabyte l3 cache they are of course both dual core parts aided by hyper threading looking to AMD's line up the core i3 6100 will be competing with the FX 6300 or the a-10 7700 k though unhampered testing we have the faster FX 8350 that being said let's move on to check out the benchmark results the core i3 6100 provided a minor performance bump over the house walk or a 340 360 in the Cinebench r15 synthetic benchmarks multi-threaded cpu test the single thread test again shows that the new skylake core i3 6100 isn't a great deal faster than the 40 360 it's going just a few extra points again we find only a minor improvement for the 6100 when compared to the 40 360 this time when benchmarking web export 2015 almost no improvement was seen in Excel 2013 as the 6100 manages to shave just 0.1 seconds off the completion time around 100 points was gained in the 7-zip benchmark that equated to just a mere 1% improvement and 11 percent improvement is seen in Photoshop CC making the 6100 a good bit faster than the 40 360 and this is the first time we've seen a noteworthy improvement rounding out the application testing the core i3 6100 delivered a 7% performance improvement over the 40 360 when encoding with handbrake the 6100 features the same HD graphics 530 engine as the desktop skylake core i5 and core i7 processors that being the case it isn't surprising that we find the 6100 delivering similar performance to that of the 6600 K and 6700 K making it quite a bit faster than the 40 360 but ultimately much slower than the a-10 7870 K hitman absolution is a game that demands strong CPU performance and this is likely why we're seeing the core i3 6143 frames per second behind the faster Core i5 and core i7 processors with just 35 frames per second the 6100 offered a decent performance increase over the 40 360 and was just three frames per second slower than the core 566 hundred K moreover it was just five frames slower than the AMD a10 78 70 K installing a mid-range discrete graphics card such as the geforce gtx 960 showed that the core i3 6100 can hang with his bigger brothers in BioShock Infinite and push the 960 to an impressive 111 frames per second at 1080 P in hitman absolution the i3 6100 was just a single frame faster than the AI 340 360 and just a single frame slower than the i5 6600 K finally we have Metro Redux which makes good use of the CPU as well as the GPU and here we're seeing a rather large performance advantage in favor of the Toro 360 100 over the AMD FX 8350 still when compared to the AI 340 360 the i3 6100 was just a single frame faster interestingly the core i3 6100 consumed just 3 watts less than the AI 340 360 there was such a slim margin it's quite possible the difference in motherboards used for testing could sway the results one way or the other the i7 6700 K didn't consume a great deal less power than the i7 4790k but the margin was more impressive than what we're seeing here between the skylake and Haswell core i3 processors before wrapping up this review I just like to point out that the core i3 is 6100 was tested with ddr4 2666 memory using a Zed 170 motherboard the same setup was used for the 6600 K and 6700 K that said those looking to pair the core i3 6100 with a cheaper motherboard using either the H 170 H 110 or be 150 chipset will be limited to the 20 133 megahertz memory speed or lower we did run a few application gaming tests using the 20 133 megahertz memory and the performance was much the same as our 26 66 megahertz configuration likewise ddr4 3,200 memory was also tested and again we didn't see much of an advantage to using this high speed memory the i3 4360 was tested using ddr3 2133 memory as with the AMD processors performance wise the skylight core i3 processors and nothing to write home about for the most part we only saw very minor performance gains within the brow with a few percent price-wise consumers will pay a very small premium as a similar core i3 has well billed to cost only around 10% less still that only works out to be something like a $20 saving so for those looking at a complete system upgrade we recommend building with skylake rather than as well as the upgrade path will justify the small price premium if you're already working with a house web-based system then the upgrade to skylake makes little to no sense in fact you would have to be using an Intel system that predates the four-year-old Sandy Bridge architecture to justify upgrading to skylight in my opinion those using older AMD hardware on the am-3 platform for example certainly have the ways to gain by upgrading to a skylake system when compared to AMD's flagship FX 8350 and FX 95 90 we're finding the core i3 6100 provides a decent upgrade particularly in the latest game such as fallout 4 in call of duty black ops 3 in fact even the new DirectX 12 title ashes of the singularity we found the core i3 6100 to be a superior solution overall the i3 6100 certainly a very capable processor and in most cases gamers will struggle to distinguish between it and the much more expensive core i5 6600 K in fact we don't recommend gamers bother investing in a Core i5 processor unless they plan to spend in excess of $300 on their graphics card thanks for watching another Hardware unboxed review if you've got any questions and please let me know in the comments or in our forum a hardware on box comm for more videos like this remember to hit like hit subscribe and I'll see you next time yeah