Intel Core i3-7350K

Antony Leather puts six of the latest mid-range CPUs through their paces

AMD Ryzen 5 1600X SCORE ✪✪✪✪✪ PRICE £191 (£229 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/275ry16

Why does the Ryzen 5 1600X cost £26 more than the Ryzen 5 1600? Both have six cores and 12 threads, plus identical cache allocations. One difference is TDP – this X-edition is rated at 95W, versus the 65W of the regular Ryzen 5 1600.

That in turn supports higher speeds: the 1600X has a nippy 3.6GHz base frequency, with a 4GHz maximum Precision Boost. The higher base figure is significant, as it represents the point where Precision Boost kicks in. Above this frequency, multi-core performance no longer scales linearly, as parallelism is sacrificed in order to achieve higher speeds.

As well as higher base and Precision Boost frequencies, the Ryzen 5 1600X has a 100MHz XFR boost, giving a maximum frequency of 4.1GHz in lightly threaded workloads. That’s a decent advantage over the maximum 3.65GHz of the regular Ryzen 5 1600.

Intel’s nearest rival to the Ryzen 5 1600X is the Core i5-7600K. That CPU took the lead in our image-editing test and in Total War: Warhammer, but in multi-threaded tests the six-core AMD CPU shone, even at stock speeds. The i5 scored 239,176 in our encoding test, compared to 366,090 for the 1600X.

For even higher performance, we were able to overclock the 1600X to 3.95GHz with a vcore of 1.425V. This yielded very similar performance to the overclocked Ryzen 5 1600, so if you’re comfortable tweaking BIOS settings, that cheaper chip is better value. If you don’t plan to overclock your system, however, the 1600X delivers a performance lift that, in our view, is worth the extra cash.

Intel Core i3-7350K SCORE ✪✪✪✪✪ PRICE £144 (£173 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/275in3

Hopes were high when Intel revealed its overclockable Core i3-7350K at the start of the year. With HyperThreading, 4MB of L3 cache and a base frequency of 4.2GHz, it looked like the perfect CPU for enthusiasts on a budget.

Sadly, its appeal has always been undermined by its price. An extra £42 will net you a Core i5-7600K with four physical cores – and the Ryzen 5 1400 offers twice the physical cores at a lower price.

The Core i3-7350K does have its strengths. One is the onboard GPU, making it cheaper and simpler to build a system around. And with a TDP of just 60W, you can get away with using a cheap CPU cooler even if you overclock it.

It’s also true that Intel’s Kaby Lake CPUs generally offer higher stock clock speeds than Ryzen CPUs, helping them pull ahead in lightly threaded software. The Core i3-7350K is no exception, proving much faster than all this month’s Ryzen CPUs in our image-editing test. However, in every other test, its lack of physical cores meant it was at a distinct disadvantage.

In our Handbrake video encoding test, for example, the cheaper Ryzen 5 1400 was significantly faster, with a score of 223,065 compared to 152,334 for the Intel CPU. Even when overclocked to 5GHz using a vcore of 1.35V, the Core i3-7350K couldn’t compete with the Ryzen 5 1400. Likewise for games tests.

With a big price drop, the i3-7350K could still be a tempting chip, but with things as they stand it makes very little sense.

Intel Core i5-7600K SCORE ✪✪✪✪✪ PRICE £179 (£215 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/275in5

Intel’s K-series Core i5 chips have long been mid-range favourites, offering unlocked overclocking potential at a reasonable price. Now, like many of Intel’s offerings, they’re challenged by Ryzen chips with more cores and threads.

Still, the Core i5-7600K is a powerful CPU. It has a base frequency of 3.8GHz and a turbo frequency of 4.2GHz – faster than any Ryzen – plus 50% more L3 cache than the i3-7350K. That pays off when it comes to lightly threaded work: in the image-editing test, it bettered all our stock-speed Ryzen CPUs by a big margin.

Elsewhere, though, the story was mixed. In our Handbrake encoding test, its stock speed score was just 239,176, compared to 319,637 for the six-core £203 Ryzen 5 1600.

There’s impressive headroom for overclocking. We were able to hit a massive 5.1GHz with a vcore of 1.35V, giving the 7600K a huge lead over AMD in the image-editing test. Even so, the Ryzen 5 1600 scored nearly 100,000 points more in the video encoding test once it too was overclocked. And the Cinebench test saw the Core i5 languish in second-to-last place, with even the Ryzen 5 1400 posting a significantly higher score. The 7600K’s key strength turned out to be gaming: it had a 10% lead in Total War: Warhammer and Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation, so if you’re building a game-focused system it’s worth considering. But the Core i5 is no longer the best all-rounder in town: in multi-threaded productivity tasks, it gets battered by Ryzen.

“In multi-threaded productivity tasks, the Core i5 gets battered by Ryzen”