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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eldakka - Sunday, February 5, 2017 - link
"celeron - duel core"Calm down, breathe. It's not something worth dueling over!
AndrewJacksonZA - Monday, February 6, 2017 - link
Yeah eldakke, "duel" vs "dual" is also something that gets my heart rate up. :-)Old_Fogie_Late_Bloomer - Monday, February 6, 2017 - link
Username checks outAssBall - Friday, February 17, 2017 - link
Duel core? Funny mine never got into a fight.....R0H1T - Friday, February 3, 2017 - link
Yeah that's true except when people find out that there's this thing called Ryzen just on the horizon. Seems to me that the HT pentium & unlocked is just a way to sell more of these KL chips & Intel are hoping/waiting for Coffee Lake to counter Zen.There's no way a dual core is justified today, even if unlocked or with HT, unless you're absolutely on a shoestring of a budget &/or KL is the only thing you want. It's such bad value for money atm that no one should be recommending it, not at this point in time.
lopri - Sunday, February 5, 2017 - link
I have to agree. Not necessarily because there is anything wrong with this chip technically but because of the competitive landscape where Intel's own quad-core chips can be had for the same or lower prices.Meteor2 - Sunday, February 5, 2017 - link
I think the only thing which can be recommended at the moment is not to buy a CPU until Zen is released, in case AMD live up to their hype in performance and price their products competitively (I.e. cheaper than Intel).bananaforscale - Wednesday, February 8, 2017 - link
And see how Intel reacts. Gimme a 20% price drop on hex cores!Jumangi - Saturday, February 4, 2017 - link
They would be misleading gamers badly as is this Anandtech review. Their gaming becnhmarks are just woefully out of date its getting embarassing. There are already games that have come out like Farcry 4 that literally won't run if the system doesn't have 4 full cores. Any real gamer is screwing themselves over by trying to skimp on a CPU like this. Any legit tech site would never reccomend less than a 4 core CPU in 2017.Meteor2 - Sunday, February 5, 2017 - link
@nathanandrews hasn't that always been the case? Except, you might not be able to afford an i7, and (as these results show) you're better buying an i5 and a better GPU for gaming.