Intel Core i3 7350K

Can an unlocked Intel Core i3 really take the world by storm? Jarred Walton  weighs up that tricky balancing act of price and performance.

Our first impression when we heard Intel was planning on such a part was intrigue—how fast would it be compared to the more expensive offerings? In particular, how would it fare when going up against the Core i5-6600K and Core i5-7600K? We must admit we had high hopes…

Let’s get the elephant in the corner out of the way: There’s no good reason to go out and spend this much money on the i3-7350K. At £185 the value is highly dubious, the Core i5-7400 immediately stands out as a better overall choice. The problem as usual comes down to core counts. The Core i3 line packs two physical cores and adds hyper-threading (aka SMT), while the Core i5 parts have four physical cores but no hyper-threading. Clock speeds do favour the i3-7350K, but dual-core and quad-core processors have been around long enough that our software actually does benefit in meaningful ways from the Core i5 approach.