Watch Dogs 2 CPU Benchmark – i3-7350K, i3-6300, i5-7600K, 7700K

Watch Dogs 2 is one of the most thread-intensive modern games we’ve yet looked at, showing significant performance benefit with the hyperthreaded i7 CPUs over even higher-clocked i5 CPUs.

The i3, then, should comparatively struggle with this game. And it sort of does, with the i3-7350K stock CPU (and EVGA GTX 1080 FTW) operating at about 66FPS AVG, comparable to the performance of the Ivy Bridge i5-3570K quad-core from a few years ago. Looking elsewhere on the bench, we see the 7350K operates at around 20FPS slower than the stock i5-7600K, or a percentage reduction of almost 30%, and is nearly 2x slower than the i7-7700K. For this particular game, most GTX 1060 and RX 480 GPU purchases and up would bottlenecked by an i3-7350K. Learn more in our Watch Dogs 2 CPU optimization guide, if that’s an issue.

Overclocking the CPU gets us an extra couple FPS, but we’re more thread-limited in this game than clock-limited, so there’s only so much we can do.

Still, we’re at least seeing a marked 10FPS improvement over the i3-6300.

Battlefield 1 CPU Benchmark – i3-7350K vs. i3-6300, i5-7600K, i5-6600K, 4690K

Battlefield 1 places the i3-7350K CPU at around 124FPS AVG, with lows tightly timed in the 70-80FPS range. Even the i3-6300 can keep up well, with lows in the same range. Although both CPUs are technically bottlenecking a GTX 1080, they’re not really posing a significant bottleneck threat to more realistic video cards for the platform.

The i3-7350K ends up right around where an i5-3570K from a few generations ago performed, and not far below an i5-4690K from the more modern era of Intel CPUs.

Total War: Warhammer CPU Benchmark (Dx11) – i3-7350K vs. i3-6300, 6600K

Again a reminder on Total War: This game has a bit more variance than we’re used to in the low frametime metrics, so those numbers aren’t our driving factor for these benchmarks. Moving to Total War: Warhammer, the i3-7350K stock posts only marginal improvements over the i3-6300 stock, with the former scoring around 122FPS AVG with 72FPS and 64FPS lows, while the latter lands at 114FPS AVG with 66FPS and 59FPS lows. Using the i3-7350K as it should be used – that is, overclocking it to 5.0GHz – we see a significant performance gain up to 140FPS AVG, with lows now in the 70-80 FPS range. That’s a gain of about 15% from an overclock – not bad, and puts us nearly at the performance of an i5-4690K stock.

Ashes of the Singularity CPU Benchmark (Dx12) – i3-7350K

The Ashes CPU-bound benchmark on High is abusive and more meant to give us a hierarchy than useful FPS metrics, since we’re more-or-less ignoring the existence of the GPU.

The i3-7350K stock CPU lands just below the 4.5GHz overclocked i5-2500K on the chart, and just above the i5-3570K stock CPU. Overclocking the i3-7350K gets us up to about on-par performance with the i7-2600K hyperthreaded CPU, and just below the i5-6600K – again, not bad hierarchical placing for an i3 CPU.

Conclusion: Is the i3-7350K Worth It vs. i5?

We were only able to ever stabilize an overclock at 5.0GHz with a 1.35 vCore, and couldn’t seem to push higher without finer tuning. Still, a 5.0GHz Core i3 is nothing to laugh at, and performance overall shows reasonable scaling post-overclock. That said, this is a CPU you should only purchase if you are honestly going to overclock it. Don’t treat this like a K-SKU i7 and buy it in case you “might” want to overclock one day, because you’re just going to rip yourself off in a big way. Overclock it or skip it.

As for value, $180 is a huge asking price. A non-K i5-7500 costs $204, and other i3 CPUs are around $120-$165. This i3-7350K feels like it should probably be a $165 CPU, which is the ~1ku price. Not as exciting as the $60-$80 G3258 of yore, but a step in the right direction. Intel must take this processor and iterate on the idea – namely by lowering price or expanding on OC options to lower SKUs in the future – and they’ll finally get that reinvigorated kick they’ve been needing. 

Editorial: Steve Burke
Testing: Patrick Lathan
Video: Andrew Coleman