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Home » A8-3870K vs. Core i3-2105 CPU Review

The Reviewed CPUs

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In the tables below, we compare the main features of the CPUs included in our review. The CPUs from Intel support the SSE4 instruction set (both SSE4.1 and SSE4.2), which is not available on the AMD CPUs included in our review. The Intel CPUs included in our review are dual-core, but since they support Hyper-Threading (HT) technology, which simulates one additional core per CPU physical core, the operating system “sees” this CPU as having four cores.

CPU Cores HT SSE4 IGP Internal Clock Turbo Clock Base Clock Core Tech. TDP Socket Price
A8-3850 4 No No Yes 2.9 GHz No 100 MHz Stars 32 nm 100 W FM1 USD 140
A8-3870K 4 No No Yes 3.0 GHz No 100 MHz Stars 32 nm 100 W FM1 USD 145
Core i3-2100 2 Yes Yes Yes 3.1 GHz No 100 MHz SandyBridge 32 nm 65 W 1155 USD 125
Core i3-2105 2 Yes Yes Yes 3.1 GHz No 100 MHz Sandy Bridge 32 nm 65 W 1155 USD 135

Prices were researched at Newegg.com on the day we published this review. TDP stands for Thermal Design Power and states the maximum amount of heat the CPU can dissipate. The CPU cooler must be capable of dissipating at least this amount of heat.

Below you can see the memory configuration for each CPU. During our review, we used DDR3-1866 memory modules.

CPU L1 Cache L2 Cache L3 Cache Memory Support Memory Channels
A8-3850 64 KB + 64 KB per core 1 MB per core No Up to DDR3-1866 Two
A8-3870K 64 KB + 64 KB per core 1 MB per core No Up to DDR3-1866 Two
Core i3-2100 32 KB + 32 KB per core 256 kB per core 3 MB total Up to DDR3-1333 Two
Core i3-2105 32 KB + 32 KB per core 256 kB per core 3 MB total Up to DDR3-1333 Two

Below we have a quick comparison of the video engine of the CPUs.

CPU Video Engine DirectX Clock Cores
A8-3850 Radeon HD 6550D 11 600 MHz 400
A8-3870K Radeon HD 6550D 11 600 MHz 400
Core i3-2100 Intel HD 2000 10.1 850 MHz 6
Core i3-2105 Intel HD 3000 10.1 850 MHz 12