Intel Core i3 2120

When people hear about Core i3 they usually think it's a slow product. You'd better get an i5 or even an i7! Well, that's not always the case. When this CPU was released in 2011 (and still interesting in 2012) it was fairly high clocked and based on the new Sandy Bridge core. It had "just" 2 cores whereas the famous Core i5 2500k and the slightly older Core i7 920 already had 4. Also AMD had quad-core Phenom II X4 counterparts available. Why would the higher clocked i3 be interesting?

It all boils down to your use-case. For Office applications it would fare very well. At the time it was a turning point for games to use more than 2 cores but still some games didn't utilize the extra cores or didn't benefit much. The Core i5 2500k was known to be a long lasting CPU (especially with overclocking) in terms of performance: I would say this Core i3 falls in the same category if you're fine with 2 cores.