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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watzupken - Friday, February 3, 2017 - link
A dual core processor is still a dual core processor even if it is unlocked and offers a high clockspeed. I still feel Kaby Lake is a lazy upgrade over Skylake considering it barely offers anything new. Just take a look at the feature page to get a sense of the "upgrades". With competition coming from ARM and AMD Ryzen, is Intel only capable of a clockspeed war just like they did for Pentium 4?CaedenV - Friday, February 3, 2017 - link
Well, to be fair Kabby Lake isn't for you and I. It is Skylake with very minor improvements mostly aimed at fixing the firmware level sleep and wake issues that manufacturers had (ie, the reason Apple didn't move to Skylake until well after release, and the botched deployment of the Surface Pro 4).Outside of that it is just skylake with a minor clock bumb, slightly better thermals, and more of the chip on 14nm.
Shadowmaster625 - Friday, February 3, 2017 - link
So it will be 2025 before an i3 beats a stock 2600K in all benchmarks? That must mean it will be 2030 before it can beat a 4.8GHz 2600K. That's crazy, considering how badly the Core2Quad compares to even a modern celeron.user_5447 - Friday, February 3, 2017 - link
Page 2: "There is one caveat however – Speed Shift currently only works in Windows 10. It requires a driver which is automatically in the OS (v2 doesn’t need a new driver, it’s more a hardware update), but this limitation does mean that Linux and macOS do not benefit from it."This is incorrect: support for Speed Shift (HW pstates) was commited to Linux kernel back in November of 2014, way before Skylake release.
https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/11/6/628
Hinton - Friday, February 3, 2017 - link
Of the 3 CPU'S Anandtech received to review, this was the only one that was marginally interesting (we didn't need a review to know Kabylake performs equally to Skylake).So of course you spent one month before reviewing it. Good for Anand that he took the money and ran.
fanofanand - Friday, February 3, 2017 - link
You may be unaware, but Ian has been kind of busy lately......Meteor2 - Sunday, February 5, 2017 - link
He has? How so?PCHardwareDude - Friday, February 3, 2017 - link
This would be interesting if the part wasn't so bloody expensive. $120 would be interesting.At this price, you're better off spending a little more and getting an i5 or spending a lot less and getting the G4600, which is also dual core kaby lake with hyperthreading.
AssBall - Friday, February 17, 2017 - link
If you have a GPUnotjamie - Friday, February 3, 2017 - link
At £170 this is the exact price I paid for my 3570k almost 5 years ago. That's what I call progress.