We’ve been waiting a while for Intel’s Kaby Lake CPUs for desktop PCs. Alongside native playback of 4K video, 7th-gen Core is going to make small but significant improvements to power efficiency — and that means overclockers are going to have a field day with cheap chips.
WCCFTech points to early benchmarks for Intel’s entry-level, budget-priced Core i3-7350K as evidence of how the next generation of Kaby Lake desktop chips is going to perform. Taking that CPU as an example, prepare to be impressed: despite being a relatively inexpensive dual-core i3, it outperforms significantly more expensive i5 chips from the current Skylake line-up.
The upcoming i3-7350K, Geekbench benchmarks show, outperforms a Core i5-6400 CPU despite having only half the physical cores. It does this thanks to an extremely fast boost clock of 4.2GHz, but there’s more to the puzzle for PC enthusiasts, because the 7350K will come with an unlocked multiplier and should be able to be overclocked to become even faster again.
There’s actually an unlocked, overclocking friendly CPU in each tier of the i3, i5 and i7 range, each of which seems to have a step up in power and performance commensurate with the expected price tag. As usual, the top of the line K-SKU i7 — this year it’ll be the i7-7700K — costs a lot, but has the fastest possible boost speed of 4.5GHz and can hit that on two of its four cores simultaneously.
These new chips should start filtering out onto the market in January next year. [WCCFTech]