After many years of neglect, Intel has finally given a chance for the Core i3 to shine. With Kaby Lake, Intel has introduced the new multiplier-unlocked Core i3 7350K aimed at overclockers. No longer limited to just the unlocked i5 and i7 processors, we can now see just how well Intel dual core chips can push their limits. Unsurprisingly, the 7350K looks pretty good with Intel showing off a system pushing 5 GHz on liquid cooling.
At $157, the 7350K is largely the same as the standard Core i3 with 2 cores + Hyper Threading, 4MB of L3 cache and a TDP of 60W. With the powerful Corsair H115i CPU liquid cooler, this particular sample managed to hit 5 GHz with 1.440V. While that a bit high, it’s still within the acceptable range. At this speed, it managed 514 points and 204 points in Cinebench 15 multi and single threaded respectively. Of course, the single threaded score is better than any stock CPU but the multi-threaded results still fall short of even the slowest quad-core Haswell i5s.
That being said, the 7350K is likely the best bang for your buck for single threaded performance which games still require. Even though it does fall below the i5, its multi-threaded performance should allow it to hang tight with comparably priced i5s. Of course, overclocking will incur some additional expenses like a custom cooler and Z series board and it remains to be seen what the average overclock will look like. Given that the Core i3s use their own separate 2 core dies rather than the 4 core dies used for the i5/i7 means the 7350K should be the cream of the crop.
The key question will be if one should go for the single thread gains today or prepare for the multi-threaded future. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, games are requiring more cores more often these days. The 7350K is expected to launch sometime in February.
