Alien: 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.

Alien Isolation on ASUS GTX 980 Strix 4GB ($560)

Alien Isolation on MSI R9 290X Gaming LE 4GB ($380)

Alien Isolation on MSI GTX 770 Lightning 2GB ($245)

Alien Isolation on MSI R9 285 Gaming 2GB ($240)

Alien Isolation on Integrated Graphics

Aside from a small dip by the Core i7-2600K when using the R9 285, the i3-7350K matches the other CPUs in Alien Isolation.

Legacy and Synthetic Tests Gaming: Total War: Attila
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  • TheinsanegamerN - Friday, February 3, 2017 - link

    This chip is 6 years late. Back when sandy bridge was the newest chip, a dual core i3 was a super relevant choice for gaming, a quad core was overkill.

    Today, for gaming builds, a i5 chip is almost always a better choice, unless you only play games that are single threaded. And the i3 is more power hungry then locked quad cores.

    At $130, this would be a great choice, but ATM, the i3k is overpriced for what it offers for a modern system.
  • nathanddrews - Friday, February 3, 2017 - link

    I'd argue that with the introduction of this i3 K-variant and the new hyperthreaded Pentium, Intel just gave a lot of people a reason to not by an i5. The message from Intel seems to be this:

    "If you need great single-threaded performance with some mild multi-threaded, get the Pentium or i3. If you need great multi-threaded performance with great single-threaded, get an i7."

    I'd say they are preemptively stacking the product deck prior to the release of AMD Ryzen - offering entry-level gamers more options without diluting their HEDT status.
  • BedfordTim - Friday, February 3, 2017 - link

    In many of the games an i3-6100 offers effectively the same performance and is $50 cheaper. It isn't a case of the i-3750k offering great performance, so much as the games are not CPU limited. This points towards an even more expensive graphics card and the even cheaper CPU.
  • jayfang - Friday, February 3, 2017 - link

    Agree. Whatever about actual performance, it seems quite clear the cool factor of "unlocked" Ryzen's and joining the "overclocking community" is getting a pre-emptive strike from Intel.
  • Michael Bay - Saturday, February 4, 2017 - link

    OC never had a "cool factor".
  • eldakka - Sunday, February 5, 2017 - link

    In the late 90's into the early 00's, when people would travel for hours carting their PC to a LAN gaming event with 100's (or even thousands) of other people, having an OC'ed machine was indeed cool amongst that Geek crowd.

    /em remembers his dual celeron 300A's OC'ed to 450MHz (yes, that's Mega - not Giga - hertz).
  • drgoodie - Tuesday, February 7, 2017 - link

    I had a dual 366Mhz Celeron box OC'd to 550Mhz. It was cool back then.
  • dsraa - Tuesday, February 14, 2017 - link

    It was indeed and still is very very cool......I had been OC'ing my systems way back to the original Pentium 100, and then got a Celeron 300, OMG those were the days....If you don't think its cool, what the hell are you doing on Anandtech??!??!!!?
  • DLimmer - Wednesday, February 15, 2017 - link

    You may have missed the joke. This was a play on words; Overclocking produces more heat so it's "not cool."
  • DLimmer - Wednesday, February 15, 2017 - link

    OC is "hot, hot, hot"!

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