The Intel Core i3-7350K (60W) Review: Almost a Core i7-2600K
by Ian Cutress on February 3, 2017 8:00 AM ESTGrand Theft Auto V
The highly anticipated iteration of the Grand Theft Auto franchise finally hit the shelves on April 14th 2015, with both AMD and NVIDIA in tow to help optimize the title. GTA doesn’t provide graphical presets, but opens up the options to users and extends the boundaries by pushing even the hardest systems to the limit using Rockstar’s Advanced Game Engine. Whether the user is flying high in the mountains with long draw distances or dealing with assorted trash in the city, when cranked up to maximum it creates stunning visuals but hard work for both the CPU and the GPU.
For our test we have scripted a version of the in-game benchmark, relying only on the final part which combines a flight scene along with an in-city drive-by followed by a tanker explosion. For low end systems we test at 720p on the lowest settings, whereas mid and high end graphics play at 1080p with very high settings across the board. We record both the average frame rate and the percentage of frames under 60 FPS (16.6ms).
The older Core i7-2600K eeks out a small ~5 FPS advantage over the Core i3 when running a GTX 980 at 1080p maximum settings, but with all other GPUs the differences are minimal. With integrated graphics, the Core i3 shows it can pummel the older IGP into the ground.
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fanofanand - Friday, February 3, 2017 - link
More to the point, the difference between SSD and HDD is bigger than the difference between Q6600 and i5 7400.BrokenCrayons - Friday, February 3, 2017 - link
I agree with fanofanand on this one. I previously owned a Q6600 and went through the trouble of upgrading to an Athlon x4 860K (recently died) with a lot more/faster RAM (16GB DDR3 2133 vs 4GB DDR2 800). The difference was pretty underwhelming. I've got a Haswell i7 at the office and was moving between it and the Q6600 and the difference in performance was something I noticed, but it didn't leave me feeling like the Q6600 was incomparably slow.Hrel - Friday, February 3, 2017 - link
I'm just gonna point out that anyone saying Intel is in trouble, needs to realize that they have intentionally chosen to not improve CPU performance for several years, instead focusing on improving the integrated GPU. Look how much that's increased! That's in addition to incrementally improving CPU performance.Intel can start channeling their immense resources into improving CPU performance anytime they wish.
Remember, it's in Intel's best interests to keep AMD from going out of business. Outpacing them to the point of making AMD irrelevant would hurt Intel, long term.
CaedenV - Friday, February 3, 2017 - link
I really don't think that Ryzen is going to make Intel dramatically bump up the per-clock efficiency.The real bottle-neck in performance is in the instruction set itself. AMD is behind Intel because they are hitting the same IPC wall. It isn't that Intel hasn't attempted to push the envelope on IPC, it is that it is a universally hard thing to improve at this stage in the game. If it wasn't so difficult then AMD would have stepped up to the task years ago. Even Ryzen isn't going to beat intel in IPC, they are merely going to close the gap a bit, sell for less, and partner with game studios to push bundles.
Die shrinks will continue to make chips more efficient, but unless someone finds a way to dramatically increase clock speed, or come out with a new instruction set that has better IPC while being backwards compatible with x86 (with minimal performance hit, which is the hard part), then I think we are stuck at this level of performance for a long time.
fanofanand - Friday, February 3, 2017 - link
Graphene.BrokenCrayons - Friday, February 3, 2017 - link
Number 2 pencils all over the world unite! :3AndrewJacksonZA - Saturday, February 4, 2017 - link
lolfanofanand - Sunday, February 5, 2017 - link
Think you may confusing graphene with graphite ;)BrokenCrayons - Tuesday, February 7, 2017 - link
Maybe I am.....oooooor maybe the pencils know something we don't!Aerodrifting - Friday, February 3, 2017 - link
There are plenty of games that can bottleneck i5 or even low power i7, Which those benchmarks never show. People who do this sorts of review clearly never play any demanding games, Therefore they are not fit to do a comparison for gaming CPUs.