Intel Core i3-13100 Raptor Lake CPU Specs Leak Hints At A Budget Gaming Contender
Intel has already announced its 13th-generation Raptor Lake desktop processors, but that launch only includes the unlocked "K" models with the highest performance, highest power draw, and highest prices. Those CPUs are awesome if you've got the scratch, but they're pretty pricey for builders on a budget—and you don't get much more out of a 14-core CPU in games, anyway.
CPU-Z doesn't know what to make of the unannounced CPU.
No, the majority of games these days still run completely fine on just four CPU cores. That's likely all the Core i3-13100 will have, assuming the latest leak from regular leakster APISAK (@TUM_APISAK on Twitter) is accurate. He shared a cropped and censored CPU-Z validation screenshot yesterday that didn't give much in the way of details, but today he shared the actual validation for what seems to be a pre-release Core i3-13100 CPU.
There really aren't any surprises in this chip. This leak confirms the specifications that were leaked before, and seems to confirm prior rumors that suggested the lower-end Raptor Lake CPUs would be using reheated Alder Lake silicon. In fact, this chip seems to be a re-badged Core i3-12100 with a 100 MHz base clock speed bump. APISAK didn't run the CPU-Z benchmark, so we can't see the turbo clock rates or any kind of performance of the new CPU, but you can expect that it's very close to the same as the Core i3-12100, but with a tiny bump in frequency.
Still, that's not bad at all. You get four Golden Cove P-cores and zero E-cores for a processor that typically hovers around $95, or $125 if you want one with functional integrated graphics. That's a strong value for a CPU that still has high single-threaded performance on the latest platform. Remember: Raptor Lake chips can go into Alder Lake 600-series motherboards, and they can still use DDR4 memory too.
A reasonable B660 board and 16GB of DDR4 memory won't cost you much more than $150, providing a very solid foundation into which you can slap a reasonably-priced graphics card (like, say, one of those Intel Arc A750 boards we just reviewed) for around $250. That's less than the price of a Core i5-13600K by itself.
In a world awash with $1,600 graphics cards and $750 CPUs, some folks were bemoaning the death of the low-end PC gaming scene, but as it usually goes with that kind of doomsaying, those rumors seem to have been greatly exaggerated.
