Intel released the Core i3 7100 on January 2017 which was a successor of the last generation Processors along with other 7 CPU's of Core i3 7th generation. It was not much different than any Core i3 CPU in cores and threads and L3 Cache. It is one of the weakest Core i3 7th generation CPU so most of the other CPU's will perform better than it. Today more than 3 years later after the the release of this CPU when there are much better CPU's in the market which are even cheaper, how the Core i3 7100 performs in 2020.
The Core i3 7100 is dual core CPU which comes with 4 threads or support of Hyper-Threading. It is based on the 7th gen Kaby Lake micro-architecture and is processed on a 14 nm technology. It comes with the Base Clock Frequency of 3.90 GHz and not be overclocked, it also comes at the TDP of 51 W. It has the L3 Cache of 3 MB and like all Intel ( non F ) CPU's it comes with an integrated graphics which is HD Graphics 630. The HD Graphics have a Base Clock of 350 MHz and a Dynamic Frequency of 1.10 GHz. This CPU can support up to 64 GB of dual channel RAM ( RAM capacity differs from motherboards to motherboards ) clocked at 2400 MHz ( max freq. ). You can pair it with any LGA1151 socket motherboard like z270, H270, B250 and many more.
For complete info. go to Intel official site
The integrated Graphics or iGPU is low a low power consumption Graphics which is not strong enough to play games at playable frame-rates, after all it is used as a display adaptor and you can watch videos or do the normal surfing easily without any problem on this integrated graphic. It is the HD 630 which is the evolved version of HD 530 and is just a little better. It comes at a Base Frequency of 350 MHz but can be overclocked up to 1.10 GHz. I would highly recommend using it with a Graphics Card.
Those were the specifications and here comes the final test or the benchmarks. For the testing, i have paired the Core i3 7100 with AMD Radeon RX 570 4GB GDDR5 ( this CPU will bottleneck the RX 570 a little bit so use a RX 560 or GTX 1050 ti at the most ) and 16 GB 2400 MHz DDR4 RAM which is dual channel. I have benchmarked Cinebench R15 and played 5 games at Ultra setting on 1920x1080p FULL HD Resolution.
This CPU scored 168 points in cinebench R15 single core tests which is pretty good which is even more than Ryzen 5 1600 and in multi core tests it scored 425 scores which are okay for normal web surfing and video watching but you can not do heavy multi tasks on it properly. In most of the games, it was pretty good except in PUBG as it is not well optimised for dual core CPU and being a dual is the biggest problem of this CPU as most of the new games require atleast 4 cores.
In the end, i will say that this CPU is a pretty average for performance but less cores and locked CPU is the biggest problem. Now when many good 4 and 4+ cores CPU's are on the market from both AMD and Intel which are cheaper and better. So, today i will say if you have a little budget and get this CPU used then you may buy this do not buy it new as there even more better options on the market which you can buy.