• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

i3 2100

A

Alyosha

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
May 1, 2003
Messages
1,884
Microcenter has these for $99 plus a free motherboard and I'm tempted to get one for a new build for my wife. Anyone have any personal experience with them? They get pretty positively reviewed but they're also pretty gimped compared to the i5/i7. Still, for 100 I'm curious. Any opinions would be appreciated.
 
Alyosha said:
MSI H61M-E33

Once again, not a great board, but for an internet/MS office/casual games box it might be good enough.
Click to expand...

Perfectly adequate for basic use. The H61 is missing a few features from the higher-end H67:

1) No native SATA 6.0 Gbps support
2) Only four SATA devices supported (other Intel 6-series chipsets support six SATA devices)
3) No RAID support (although AHCI is supported)

In addition, that MSI motherboard is one of the few LGA 1155 motherboards that do not have an onboard USB 3.0 controller at all.
 
DeathPrincess said:
Is it overclockable at all? (not that you would, just intrested for adaptability viewpoint)
Click to expand...

Nope. The i3-2100 CPU cannot be overclocked at all due to its lack of a Turbo feature. Nor do any of the H6x-series chipsets allow any multiplier overclocking at all. Plus, the Sandy Bridge CPUs do not like BCLK settings much above the stock 100MHz. The H-series chipsets allow overclocking of only the integrated graphics/video portion of the CPU.
 
At stock this CPU will be faster than just about any stock AMD x4 CPU so this is a great deal if you are not going to overclock.
 
I know it's kind of silly to even ask, but there are no unlocked i3s? I've seen 35w i3s (2100T? I saw it listed on a shop as 35w).
So was looking into the viability of having a low wattage down clocked system for file serving, that could be upclocked to usable settings for games/LAN etc. But this doesn't seem doable. Not sure how low wattage you could make a i5 with downclocking/undervoltage.
 
I believe the i3 2100 at stock is a reasonably powerful processor for most games without overclocking.
 
DeathPrincess said:
I know it's kind of silly to even ask, but there are no unlocked i3s? I've seen 35w i3s (2100T? I saw it listed on a shop as 35w).
Click to expand...

There are no "unlocked" i3s per se; it's just that in this case the i3s cannot have their multiplier manually set to higher than stock. All of Intel's CPUs, the i3s included, can have their multiplier manually set to a lower-than-stock setting (in fact, all the way down to a combination of BCLK and multiplier that equals 1.6GHz).
 
I was also considering picking this up for $100 as well. I currently have a Core Duo e6420 proccessor in my 2008r2 which does ok running HyperV. Any thoughts if I would notice a significant performance increase if I upgraded to the i3 2100?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top