Intel Core i3-10105 10th Gen Comet Lake Processor

Intel Core i3-10105 Processor Review

When Intel released its 11th Generation “Rocket Lake” processors in 2021, the company launched only Core i5, Core i7, and Core i9 models for the desktop market. If you wanted to build a lower-end system, the best you could do with Team Blue’s newest-generation chips was “Comet Lake Refresh,” a short series of slightly tweaked 10th Generation Core i3 and Pentium models. These processors are mildly upclocked versions of original 10th Generation Comet Lake parts, on Intel’s same LGA 1200 socket. Now that lower-end 12th Generation “Alder Lake” CPUs are coming to market, so has begun the sunset on LGA 1200. We got our hands on one of the moderate-priced Core i3 Refresh models, the Core i3-10105, to see what kind of performance you can expect from this low-cost chip as socket LGA 1200 becomes a value play and gives way to Alder Lake’s LGA 1700. Spoiler? It’s competent enough, if not a budget chip to make the heart race, mostly saved by two facts: (1) that it has integrated graphics, and (2) that you can actually buy it.

Performance

No surprise, but the Core i3-10105 turned in the lowest results of this group in most tests we ran. The Core i5 and i7 processors, and the Ryzen 5 and 7, have extra cores that give them a decisive advantage, which makes the Ryzen 3 3100 the only real competition in this list. Unfortunately for Intel, in some of these tests the Core i3-10105 is significantly slower than the Ryzen 3 3100. In Handbrake, the Core i3-10105 took a full six minutes longer to finish the test render task than the Ryzen 3 3100. The Core i3 was slower in our Cinebench, Geekbench, 7-Zip, and Blender trials, by smaller relative amounts. Intel’s Core i3-10105 did manage to pull ahead of the Ryzen 3 3100 in a few tests, but by a small margin where it did. It was slightly faster when running the Puget Systems Puget Bench for Adobe Premiere Pro 15 CC, and its biggest win came while running POV-Ray.

We then moved to our dedicated-graphics testing, with the Core i3 paired with our discrete GeForce RTX 3080 Ti card. In these gaming tests, the difference between the Core i3-10105 and the Ryzen 3 3100 narrowed considerably, with both processors coming close to tying in many of our synthetic and game tests. In most of the game tests, the Ryzen 3 3100 came out ahead, but by a margin of only 1 to 3 frames per second in most games. After that, we yanked the GeForce card and tested the integrated graphics performance. If anything, it’s a bit worse than we expected to see. Intel equipped many of its 10th and 11th Generation chips with the same UHD Graphics 630 IGP, which has given us plenty of opportunities to test this UHD Graphics silicon before. It’s the same IGP that’s found inside of the Core i5-10600K in the charts below…