The Budget Buster
LENGTH OF TIME: 1 hour LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY: Easy
The concept around this is pretty simple – we just love the idea behind the Core i3-10100. When this editor first joined the tech industry, the crème de la crème of desktop processors was whatever quad-core, Hyper-Threaded chip Intel had to offer at the time. That was the end goal. Ryzen wasn’t yet a thing, and anything more than four cores was relegated to the world of HEDT, which was a bit more inaccessible. Motherboards were more expensive, and memory costs immediately shot up whenever you mentioned the phrase “quad-channel.”
Fast forward to 2020, and with the launch of Intel’s latest chips, this little beauty fell into our lap. Well, it was a special request we put in with Intel really, because bizarrely most agencies, PRs, publications, and tech journo outlets don’t spend a lot of time on the small stuff – which is a shame, because it’s fascinating to see how an Intel Core i9-10900K or Ryzen 9 5950X gets filtered down into the lower specced parts, and how they perform in contrast. Many of you will remember that Christian built a solid “office” PC back in our Holiday edition that featured this chip. But this was in a lot of ways quite gluttonous: the price
