The Intel Core i3-7350K (60W) Review: Almost a Core i7-2600K
by Ian Cutress on February 3, 2017 8:00 AM ESTOffice Performance
The dynamics of CPU Turbo modes, both Intel and AMD, can cause concern during environments with a variable threaded workload. There is also an added issue of the motherboard remaining consistent, depending on how the motherboard manufacturer wants to add in their own boosting technologies over the ones that Intel would prefer they used. In order to remain consistent, we implement an OS-level unique high-performance mode on all the CPUs we test which should override any motherboard manufacturer performance mode.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
Dolphin Benchmark: link
Many emulators are often bound by single thread CPU performance, and general reports tended to suggest that Haswell provided a significant boost to emulator performance. This benchmark runs a Wii program that ray traces a complex 3D scene inside the Dolphin Wii emulator. Performance on this benchmark is a good proxy of the speed of Dolphin CPU emulation, which is an intensive single core task using most aspects of a CPU. Results are given in minutes, where the Wii itself scores 17.53 minutes.
The 7350K, with a high single thread frequency, easily surpasses the i5 and i7-2600K here. That being said, there's a slight difference to the Skylake i3, perhaps down to various generation specific code differences.
WinRAR 5.0.1: link
Our WinRAR test from 2013 is updated to the latest version of WinRAR at the start of 2014. We compress a set of 2867 files across 320 folders totaling 1.52 GB in size – 95% of these files are small typical website files, and the rest (90% of the size) are small 30 second 720p videos.
WinRAR is more geared towards a variable threaded environment but also memory speed. The fact that the Core i5 is above the Core i3 shows that having actual cores helps, regardless of frequency - the additional hyperthreads for the Core i7-2600K also gives it the win, despite the memory frequency difference.
3D Particle Movement v2
3DPM is a self-penned benchmark, taking basic 3D movement algorithms used in Brownian Motion simulations and testing them for speed. High floating point performance, MHz and IPC wins the day. This is the second variant of this benchmark, fixing for false sharing in the first version, and lending itself to better multithreaded performance.
3DPMv2 is still new, so we don’t have too many results for it so far - but again this is another situation where having actual cores helps. This is typically when the threads are 'heavy', i.e. spill out into various caches and require more than 1/2 the cache shared within a core each. In the case of the Kaby Lake, this means that each core has 32KB of L1 - or 32KB per thread for the i5 but only 16KB per thread in the i3.
SYSMark 2014
Engineered by BAPco (to which Intel is a consortium member), this set of tests are designed to be an office/data/media/financial range of tests using common well-known CAD, image editing, web browsing and other tools to put out a score, where a score of 1000 is attributed to an old Core i3 using a mechanical harddrive. Here we report the overall score, however the test breakdowns can be found in Bench.
Because SYSMark is a variety of tests that rely on response and throughput, here is where the Core i3 comes into play over the i5 and i7-2600K. With the i5 it's about equal, but the years of IPC increases put the i7-2600K now behind the Kaby i3.
Web Benchmarks
On the lower end processors, general usability is a big factor of experience, especially as we move into the HTML5 era of web browsing. For our web benchmarks, we take well-known tests with Chrome as installed by SYSMark as a consistent browser.
Mozilla Kraken 1.1
Kraken favors high frequency and IPC, so the i3 takes a large lead over the i7-2600K for this sort of workload.
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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.