Intel 12th Gen Core i3 12100 and i3 12300 Review

Affordable Option Alternative

For comparison purposes we always run the same system as much as possible. It can't have escaped your notice that the likelihood of you only having £130 to spend on a CPU, but £170 to spend on a cooler and £1000 to spend on a GPU is tiny. Therefore we wanted to quickly build a more representative setup for processors at this end of the price spectrum. Admittedly we've made this look as flash as possible, so it isn't necessarily as cheap as possible, but it's a good example of what you can achieve with significantly lower investment than our test setup. Air cooled 120mm on our Core i3-12300 with a Radeon RX 6700 XT, it's the type of build that you could easily put together and - unless you want it all to be white - for way less money than our review setup.

Obviously you don't have to push everything into the white side of life, and there will be a hefty cost punishment for doing so, but we wanted to show that going for affordable components doesn't mean you have to give up your aesthetics.

The Core i3-12300 is already a very cool processor with our insane cooling setup, but switching to the £20 120mm option doesn't exactly heat things up. It's the perfect combination of performance and price. Lovely.