Intel Core i3 8350K
Driving the budget concept in a whole new direction Alan Dexter struggles to keep up, doing a three-point turn in Bath’s traffic.
What costs almost as much as a Core i5 processor but isn’t as fast? That’s right – a budget processor from Intel that, as it turns out, isn’t really that low cost.
There are two important factors when it comes to Intel’s Core i3-8350K. First, it’s unlocked; and second, it costs £160. It’s good that you can overclock it, but that’s unquestionably a lot of money for a chip that most of us would perceive as being a budget offering. For context here, this isn’t the only eighth-generation Core i3 currently available, as the Core i3-8100 rolls in at a much more palatable £100. Intel clearly knows what sort of price it can expect to charge for budget hardware, even if it’s decided to ignore that wisdom here.
Under Intel’s new branding, a Core i3 is a quad-core processor that lacks Hyper-Threading (just like the Core i5), but also lacks a Turbo mode. To be fair, the base clock frequency of 4GHz is healthy enough, even if it won’t be jumping up and down as more/fewer cores are used. As we’ve mentioned, though, this CPU also happens to be unlocked, so if you want to push the chip harder, you can. And you really can.
You get 8MB of cache to help keep things ticking along nicely, support for up to 64GB of DDR4 RAM, and integrated graphics in the form of Intel’s UHD Graphics 630, which has a nominal base clock of 350MHz, capable of hitting a maximum speed of 1.15GHz. While this obviously can’t compete with dedicated graphics silicon when it comes to driving the latest games, it does mean that you can build a machine without a discrete GPU, which can help keep the overall price and size of the machine down, versus a Ryzen system, say.
There is one small problem when it comes to that notion of budget, though, and it’s that your options on the motherboard front are limited to a single chipset, and that’s the enthusiast-class Z370. There is a surprisingly good spread of options here, but with even the cheapest starting out at £90, we’re some way off the £55 starting point that formed the basis of many a budget Core i3 build using the B250 mobos from the previous generation. More budgetconscious chipsets should be on the way, but for now, the combo of this chip alongside the cheapest Z370 board starts out at just under £250. Gulp.
Performance part
We may have reservations about how this chip is being pitched, but when it comes to performance, our opinion is much more straightforward: it’s great. That high-base clock speed combined with four real cores makes for some great results. Indeed, in testing, this chip was just a shade off the performance offered by the last-generation Core i5-7600K. Comparing it to the closest priced chip from AMD, the Ryzen 5 1500X, which is a quad-core chip as well, albeit with SMT (Simultaneous Multi-Threading), so it can handle eight threads. It’s a neck and neck fight, with the added threads of the Ryzen helping it to win in some areas, but the raw grunt from Intel’s single-core performance trumping Team Red (that’s AMD) elsewhere.
When it comes to overclocking, we managed to get our silicon running at 4.9GHz, with only a little extra voltage (1.4V), resulting in a Cinebench score of 784 (with a single-thread score of 205). Impressive figures, even if you’ll need to spend more on your cooler to hit that.
The problem for this unlocked Core i3 is Intel’s own Core i5-8400, a chip that costs just £40 more, yet boasts 50 per cent more cores. The Core i5 also has more cache and a lower TDP, at 65W as opposed to 91W. Of course, you can’t overclock that chip, which is a win for the Core i3-8350K, but we’d still prefer to have the extra cores of the Intel or extra threads of the Ryzen.