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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CaedenV - Friday, February 3, 2017 - link
Seems to me you only hit the CPU wall when dealing with multiple GPUs. For most games, with a single GPU, and i3 is plenty. Considering an i3 does not have enough PCIe lanes to support multiple GPUs this is a rather moot point.Aerodrifting - Saturday, February 4, 2017 - link
Like I said, You don't play any CPU demanding games so you have no right to make those ridiculous comments. Take battlefield 1 for example, Good luck in a 64 player map with i3.Michael Bay - Saturday, February 4, 2017 - link
>plays bf1>blabs about rights
You`re like a perfect example.
Aerodrifting - Saturday, February 4, 2017 - link
Nice trolling, loser.I am simply making a point: There are tons of games can bottleneck i3, Battlefield 1 is just one example, Stop lying to others "i3 can game just fine like i7 etc" it's very misleading and misinformed.
fanofanand - Sunday, February 5, 2017 - link
Considering the length of time Dr Cutress has been reviewing CPUs and gaming, any notion that he is not fit to be reviewing gaming CPUs is absurd.Aerodrifting - Sunday, February 5, 2017 - link
The notion of someone who is good at theorycraft reviews must be an expert at knowing gaming PC is absurd. 1 min of benchmark run in single player mode suddenly makes you an expert at gaming computer? Give me a break.BrokenCrayons - Thursday, February 9, 2017 - link
If you doubt the validity of the claims made in these articles in spite of the years of experience the writers have AND the supporting evidence of their work, then its rather odd you'd read any of these reviews at all. We can infer from your responses that you feel insecure about your purchase decisions, feel compelled to defend them aggressively, and that you're dismissing the evidence at hand even though you personally find it useful so you can justify the defensiveness -- more to yourself than others here because honestly, why should the opinions ruffle your feathers if there's genuinely no doubt in your mind that you feel you're as correct as you claim?Aerodrifting - Saturday, February 11, 2017 - link
Nice job coming up with such rhetoric yet no concrete evidence in your argument. I do NOT DOUBT the validity of the claims, I KNOW they are WRONG for a fact. Your reviewers do reviews for the sake of results from incomplete tests and benchmarks that can not represent real life results, Therefore the conclusion is wrong. I have been playing video games and playing around with hardware when you guys were playing with sand, Before this website is even established, Yet you want to talk about "years of experience"? I am not defending anything, I am simply pointing out you are wrong and you are misleading people, You are just butthurt because finally someone is having a different opinion and they are actually right.You want evidence? Let's save the rhetoric and go straight to facts, There are games that can severely bottleneck i3 or even i5, Battlefield is just one of them. Doesn't matter what video card you use, Join a 64 player game and you can see your CPU usage go over 90% and game starts stuttering on i3 / i5.
Ratman6161 - Friday, February 3, 2017 - link
"there will be a time where a Core i3 based CPU will match the performance of the older Core i7-2600K"Maybe, but not today! I'm still patting myself on the back for my purchase of the i7-2600K back in the spring of 2011. My first computer ran an 8088 and for every computer I owned weather off the shelf or self built from then until 2011 left me constantly on the upgrade treadmill looking for more speed . But with the 2600K I finally hit good enough (other than adding more RAM and replacing spinning disks with SSD's along the way). While its fun to read about the new stuff I don't really see myself upgrading again until either the CPU or (more likely) the motherboard give out.
CaedenV - Friday, February 3, 2017 - link
Yep! I have upgraded the ram several times, the GPU a few times, and moved from HDD to SSD, all of which have kept my 2600 very happy.What is going to get me to change over is going to be the motherboard level improvements. I cant get a much faster GPU without hitting a PCIe2 bottleneck. NVMe, while impractical (real world tests show little to no improvement), has me drooling for an upgrade. 4-10gig Ethernet is going to be more and more popular going forward. DDR4 is finally maturing to a point where it is actually better than DDR3. All new devices run USB-C, and my piddly 4 USB3 ports can't do them all, and certainly not at full speed.
It is literally everything around the CPU that is slowly making me want to upgrade, not the CPU itself. But even these improvements need another year or two to bake before I am really thinking about an upgrade. I am just unfortunately very happy with what I have, and I have one more GPU upgrade (looking forward to something like a GTX1170) before I will really need a new system.
Who knows, this might be my last 'real' PC. In a few years it may make more sense to have a central gaming server that runs all the games, and then stream them to an end-user PC that is no more powerful than a cell phone.... or just dock my cell phone.