Intel Core i3 7350K
Can an unlocked Intel Core i3 really take the world by storm? Jarred Walton weighs up that tricky balancing act of price and performance.
An unlocked Core i3 Kaby Lake CPU hits the shelves. Promising Core i5 speed but from a budget line, something has to be too good to be true, we investigate…
Our first impression when we heard Intel was planning on such a part was intrigue—how fast would it be compared to the more expensive offerings? In particular, how would it fare when going up against the Core i5-6600K and Core i5-7600K? We must admit we had high hopes…
Let’s get the elephant in the corner out of the way: There’s no good reason to go out and spend this much money on the i3-7350K. At £185 the value is highly dubious, the Core i5-7400 immediately stands out as a better overall choice. The problem as usual comes down to core counts. The Core i3 line packs two physical cores and adds hyper-threading (aka SMT), while the Core i5 parts have four physical cores but no hyper-threading. Clock speeds do favour the i3-7350K, but dual-core and quad-core processors have been around long enough that our software actually does benefit in meaningful ways from the Core i5 approach.
This is definitely a new class of processor, as previously the only way you could overclock Core i3 was via BCLK adjustments, which didn’t always work so well. We’re not sure if Intel has properly locked down the other CPUs this round.
Kaby Lake makes the most sense when you’re building a new PC—we wouldn’t recommend upgrading from Skylake to Kaby Lake, or even from Haswell/Broadwell. If you’re looking at older Intel CPUs, the i3-7350K is roughly equivalent to an i5-2500K, both running at stock. That’s not a bad result by any means, but we are talking about a six-year-old CPU and the difference in launch price is still only about £40. You would have to be using very old hardware for the 7350K to be a significant upgrade in performance.
Ryzen to the challenge
Moving over to gaming, things become a bit more exciting. Games tend to scale much better with clock speeds and efficient CPU architectures rather than core counts. Here, even the stock i3-7350K easily wins out over AMD’s current best processor, the FX-8370. This is why AMD CPUs haven’t been recommended as the best gaming solution for quite some time. Even games that scale a bit better with higher core counts favour Core i3 over the FX series.
The Core i3-7350K ends up as quite of a perplexing chip. Performance is reasonably good for a dual-core processor and in games it comes relatively close to more expensive CPUs… but it’s not really that much cheaper, especially if you factor in the cost of a Z270 motherboard. In this instance, it feels like Intel is reaching on this one and attempting to find an untapped market but refusing to offer too much CPU at too low of a price. Simply put, just as we suspected, there are better processors to choose from in this price bracket.
There’s still AMD’s Ryzen to contend with, where all the models will be multiplier unlocked. The current rumours suggest AMD will officially unveil the Ryzen models at GDC by the time you read this, with 4-core/8thread, 8-core/8-thread, and 8-core/16thread parts. As with the i7-7700K and i5-7600K, at this point Ryzen is so close that there’s no harm in waiting to see how the chips actually perform and how much they’ll cost.
Budget processors can be interesting, but they need to be budget parts. The Core i3-7350K is more expensive than AMD’s current fastest APUs and CPUs. If you’re able to afford an i3-7350K, do yourself a favour and pick up a Core i5 part instead. Or wait for Ryzen.