The Skylake Core i3 (51W) CPU Review: i3-6320, i3-6300 and i3-6100 Tested
by Ian Cutress on August 8, 2016 9:00 AM ESTAlien: Isolation
If first person survival mixed with horror is your sort of thing, then Alien: Isolation, based off of the Alien franchise, should be an interesting title. Developed by The Creative Assembly and released in October 2014, Alien: Isolation has won numerous awards from Game Of The Year to several top 10s/25s and Best Horror titles, ratcheting up over a million sales by February 2015. Alien: Isolation uses a custom built engine which includes dynamic sound effects and should be fully multi-core enabled. We take the average frame rate as our marker with a scripted version of the built-in benchmark.
For this test we used the following settings with our graphics cards:
| Alien Isolation Settings | |||
| Resolution | Quality | ||
| Low GPU | Integrated Graphics | 1280x720 | Ultra |
| ASUS R7 240 1GB DDR3 | |||
| Medium GPU | MSI GTX 770 Lightning 2GB | 1920x1080 | Ultra |
| MSI R9 285 Gaming 2G | |||
| High GPU | ASUS GTX 980 Strix 4GB | 1920x1080 | Ultra |
| MSI R9 290X Gaming 4G | |||
Alien Isolation seems to have recently had an update that affects low powered GPUs, pushing our new results to be very different to the results in our database. It only seems to affect the IGP and R7 240 results, so for now we'll focus on the other data.
In each case the Core i3s perform at the top or near the top, with the higher frame rates being with the higher frequency parts. However, for our mid-range GPUs (R9 285, GTX 770), that doesn't seem to matter that much, and the $70 AMD Athlon X4 845, along with the A10 parts, are within shouting distance. However, the effect gets worse with higher power GPUs, with the graphs taking an Intel/AMD split almost. The 8-thread AMD FX part sits as close as it can, but the Skylake parts pull a 10+ FPS advantage, which equates to an 8% or better difference.
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Samus - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
^This.I love WinRAR, but even a blind test will demonstrate 7zip to be faster, especially at compression. Decompression is often storage limited unless you have a good RAID or PCIe SSD.
plopke - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
I bought a core i3 6300 for my parents but only paid the price of a i3 6100 around 109 euro, the price gap is so big for such a small performance increase some vendors decided just to dump them out of their inventory.ShieTar - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
Nice review. Any chance that the Pentiums and maybe even Celerons will be added to the comparison?Everybody reviews the i5&i7, but it's really hard to get any feel on how fast (or slow) the very cheapest Intel CPUs really are.
fanofanand - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
I second this, I see a lot of inexpensive devices running low-end Intel parts and it sure would be nice to see how they stack up.jaydee - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
Any attempts at trying Quicksync with the Skylake i3?AndrewJacksonZA - Wednesday, August 10, 2016 - link
+1 on the Quicksync please.elbert - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
The i3's should have been removed from the desktop line up a long time ago. Quad cores come out over 10 years ago and Intel is still trying to sale dual cores for the desktop. Its really a testament to how tight a hold Intel's monopoly is on the PC business. Currently the hold that is killing the PC business.DanNeely - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
The persistence of dual core hardware says more about the failure of most software to benefit from larger numbers of cores. Unless you've got at least 3 big threads running in parallel the extra physical cores of the i5/7 only serve to drive up manufacturing costs and power consumption.FunBunny2 - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
-- The persistence of dual core hardware says more about the failure of most software to benefit from larger numbers of cores.the number of embarrassingly parallel user space applications continues to be stuck at a couple.
Ratman6161 - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
But, for all those that are just web surfing, reading email, and typing Word documents, how much parallelism do they need? A while back I refurbished a couple of Core 2 duo laptops from about 2009. Upgraded them from 2GB to 4BB of cheap ram and slapped an el-cheapo SSD in place of the old 5400 RPM disk drives and they felt like new machines. For the people doing the sorts of tasks I mentioned above, they are more than good enough - even an i3 is overkill for the task.