The unexpected i3-7350K chip is the first unlocked multiplier Intel CPU that is likely to please budget gamers because of its price point. And although the third launched "K" chip has hyper-threading capability, it lacks the turbo boost. Is it still worth the price? Read more details here!

Should You Go for i3-7350K or Buy i5 Instead?

The capability of i3-7350K is tested in the following benchmarks - 3D Mark Fire Strike Extreme, Doom, Metro: Last Light and GTA V to see whether the chip is a must-buy or to be set aside. The following benchmark results have been consolidated by Segment Next:

In 3D Mark Fire Strike Extreme, i3 and i5 score do not have a huge difference at all having the result of 5558 and 5656 respectively where i3 was overclocked to 5GHz and i5 at 4.6GHz. In Doom, both i3 and i5 have the same score with 103 using the same clockspeed.

In "Metro: Last Light", the most CPU-intensive title, unexpectedly, i5 has only a little bit of advantage from i3 with scores 84 and 79 in favor of the former. Lastly, in GTA V which is both GPU and CPU-intensive game, i5 scores more compared to i3 with 60 and 48 in favor of the former.

In conclusion, based on the benchmarks conducted, it still wise to go for i5 compared to i3-7350K if you are going to spend the same amount of money. The only advantage that i3-7350K is its unlocked feature but still more cores CPU such i5 is still preferable.

Other Advantages of i3-7350K

Kaby Lake is said to be a minor improvement to the existing architecture of Intel CPU which clearly focusses on the optimization and overclocking of the existing ones. According to Forbes, these CPUs does not offer significant improvement to gaming but has a lot to offer when it comes to 4k video engine such as streaming Netflix in 4K which would need Kaby Lake CPU and Windows 10.

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