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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DonMiguel85 - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
I remember in Eurogamer's i3-6100 review, just using 2666 or 3200MHz DDR4 gave a significant performance boost in pretty much all games, especially Ryse whose maximum FPS almost doubled from 59 to over 100FPS. And this was at the stock CPU clockspeed. Minimum frames improved substantially too.wintermute000 - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
Problem is the price premium for 3200Mhz, you're already halfway to the cost of a dGPU like a GTX950 or R460 that will blow the doors off any iGPUwintermute000 - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
whoops I guess I was looking at the expensive stuff, realised that not all 3200 is priced that much higherbeginner99 - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
exactly. If you go Skylake, buy 3200 mhz RAM. For 16 GB it's only $20-30 more than 2133 mhz RAM and totally worth it.fanofanand - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
Fantastic article Ian, you are definitely doing a great job of filling in the "lull" period between major GPU reviews. I have been wanting exactly this review to be done, as I would love to be able to build my kid a cheap computer for school that could do a bit of light gaming. I was really hoping the APUs would give adequate performance, but it looks like I will be waiting for Zen. I really don't want to get a dGPU for his computer and with Intel it doesn't look like there is much of a choice. Zen it is! Please don't disappoint us AMD!BrokenCrayons - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
I'm keenly interested in seeing what Zen brings to the table too. However my next desktop PC upgrade is going to be a GPU of some sort and even that's probably a good 6+ months away if not more. Zen will be another CPU+Mobo+RAM swap and I'm not looking forward to anything of the sort right now...unless Zen can more than double the performance of my 860K, at which point I'll be very interested.Achaios - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
Bought a brand new laptop today with an Intel Core i5-6200U Skylake onboard (which you have failed to include in your table) clocked at 2.3 GHz which turbos to 2.8 GHz.The thing I wanna say if you try to install Windows 7 on a Skylake machine without making a little in-depth research, you're screwed.
One way to install Windows 7 on Skylake machines is described by the following ASROCK article:
http://www.asrock.com/microsite/win7install/
(Thank you ASROCK).
I am not ashamed to say I spent the better part of day fighting off the dreaded "A required CD/DVD drive device driver is missing" before I had my Windows 7 Pro 64 Bit slipstreamed and updated by ASROCK's app.
Perhaps you should consider adding a couple of words on the subject as there are many ppl who will stay on Windows 7 for several years to come and are not very familiar with the Skylake platform.
DonMiguel85 - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
Well, of course it's not on the table - that's a mobile chip. Plus unless you have some specific business need to use Windows 7 I don't see why you would go through the hassle of putting it on there. It's an almost 7 year old OS.fanofanand - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
LOL "failed to include" I love it. "I bought it so you should review it, even if it's not even in the same segment as the other products you are reviewing". Classic snowflake narcissism.Meteor2 - Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - link
1. I wish you'd calculated price/performance and power/performance for us, rather than leaving us to guesstimate2. The game benchmarks need 95th (or whatever) percentile frame rates and minimum frame times, as that's where the performance difference between i3 and i5 truly lies.