GoKawiilIf you want to buy a CPU for $100 today, you have three options. There’s AMD’s Ryzen 5 5500 at $80, alongside Intel’s Core i3-12100F at $90 and Core i3-14100F at a clean $100. Of course, you can go back in time to pick up something like the Core i7-6700 or Ryzen 3 4100, but if you’re after the best CPU for gaming , those chips won’t cut it. I wanted to see how much performance you could get out of a chip for $100, brand new, without mucking around eBay or dusting off DDR3 DIMMs.
Although AMD and Intel have mostly abandoned the sub-$150 price point with newer generations, it’s still a popular segment among budget builders. That’s evidenced by the fact that the Ryzen 5 5500 is (and has been for months) the second best-selling CPU on Amazon. And despite being much lower in the rankings, Intel’s Core i3-12100F ranks higher on that chart than the newer Core Ultra 5 250K Plus .
This segment has only become more important over the past six months, as well. Rising SSD and RAM costs, along with GPU shortages, have bloated the price of building a PC. These chips not only represent a cheap entry point into a relatively modern PC, they also represent a big cost-savings with memory; all three CPUs support DDR4, which is about half as expensive as a kit of DDR5 right now.
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We put all three chips through our full gauntlet of benchmarks, as featured in our CPU reviews, to see how they stack up to each other. The goal here is to look at the entry point for building a PC today, taking into account the full cost of a build. You can bump up your budget and get a much better CPU, such as the Ryzen 5 7600X, but that carries with it the baggage of DDR5 prices. We’re capping the budget at $100 to truly segment what the state of entry-level CPUs looks like in 2026.
To that end, we’re mainly comparing these CPUs to each other. In our testing below, we’ll call out some neighboring chips at the budget end of the market, but we’re really focused on our three main test subjects. We evaluate all aspects of the chips as they relate to each other more so than the broader market that starts to pick up closer to the $200 price point. If you want to see more comparisons, make sure to look at our CPU benchmark hierarchy .
$100 CPU Shootout: Specs and Features
$100 CPU Shootout: Specs and Features
Swipe to scroll horizontally Row 0 - Cell 0 Arch Cores / Threads Base / Boost Clock (GHz) Cache (L2 / L3) TDP / PPT or MTP Memory Ryzen 5 5500 Zen 3 6 / 12 3.6 / 4.2 19 MB (3 + 16) 65W / 88W DDR4-3200 Core i3-12100F Alder Lake 4 / 8 3.3 / 4.3 17 MB (5 + 12) 58W / 89W DDR4-3200 / DDR5-4800 Core i3-14100F Raptor Lake Refresh 4 / 8 3.5 / 4.7 17 MB (5 + 12) 58W / 110W DDR4-3200 / DDR5-4800
The Ryzen 5 5500 and Core i3-12100F are both from 2022, and the Core i3-14100F is from 2024, but the specs for these CPUs feel ripped straight out of 2015. We have two quad-core Intel chips with relatively high boost clocks facing off against an AMD hexa-core chip, and despite AMD packing more cores, it has the cheapest price of the three CPUs in our lineup at only $80 on sale.
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