Will it be worth it to buy a Skylake i3?

[eternalone]

Im asking your opinions on the matter. I want to upgrade to skylake relatively cheaply and get the most performance bang for the buck. But I cant for the life of me justify buying a dual core cpu in 2015 for over lets say over $85 bucks, which is what AMD offers in the 860k be it a much slower cpu but with 4 cores. So this is the conundrum. Why dosent intel release i3's with Tri-core to make it worthwhile for consumers, and name the dual cores i2's or something wouldnt that make more sense business wise? Im not gonna pay over $125 for a dual core cpu in 2015 doesn't make sense, unless it were unlocked maybe.

What do you think????

 

[Yuriman]

Intel's Haswell i3's have (in almost all cases) better multithreaded performance than AMD's quads, and are often close to the FX-6300. I imagine a Skylake i3 would have performance similar to or better than an FX-6300 in multithreaded tasks. So, yes, I'd say it's worth it.

EDIT: I'll dig up some benches in a few minutes.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

If the Skylake Core i5 are going to be 65W, I wonder what the Core i3 will be.

 

[frozentundra123456]

With the athlon, you will have to buy a dgpu or use motherboard graphics (do FM2 motherboards even have it?), so the price difference is less than it seems. If you want to go cheap "quad core", I think the sweet spot for AMD apus is tha A8-7600. But for the vast majority of cpu tasks an i3 is going to be faster than an AMD apu. anand bench .

But apparently you realize that, so I dont know why the number of "cores", would even come up.

 

[Yuriman]

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7963/...iew-core-i7-4790-i5-4690-and-i3-4360-tested/3

Not much point in a quad if it has less total throughput than a dual core in a well-threaded task. From Anand's i3 review, AMD's FM2+ chips win exactly zero times in multithreaded scenarios.

 

[Roland00Address]

Intel's Haswell i3's have (in almost all cases) better multithreaded performance than AMD's quads, and are often close to the FX-6300. I imagine a Skylake i3 would have performance similar to or better than an FX-6300 in multithreaded tasks. So, yes, I'd say it's worth it.

EDIT: I'll dig up some benches in a few minutes.

To make your life simpler here is the equilvalent A10 cpu with the same clockspeed and thermals

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1200?vs=1197

As you can see the i3 murders the AMD when it is faster, it is close for some things, and amd wins in only of a couple of tasks in linux but none in windows. Now you have to manually remove all the gpu benches for they are intermixed for example the pcmarks a10 gpu benchmarks are faster than the i3 but with the athlon 860k you have no igp so intel instant wins in those areas.

 

[throwa]

I'm dying to learn more about Skylake core i3's and Pentiums.

Is it true they will do a "full" reveal around September 1?

Depending on the TDP of Skylake i3 and the price etc it may be the best value for peasants/poor/budget gamers.

I'm not a "hardcore" gamer and haven't been for a few years now, but what I have in mind is a cheap little WoW-box (for Legion) with a brand new Skylake CPU, new mobo, fresh DDR4 ram, etc. WoW is pretty much the only game I still play, so I figure a Core i3 is more than sufficient - no need for overkill with a big quad-core "monster" rig or a pricey GPU.

 

[bbhaag]

For the longest time I was a die hard AMD fan. Dating back to the Athlon Xp era. Around four years ago I built my rig around a 965. I was in it man. I was balls deep into AMD. I was a fanboy.

Then my son got into PC gaming. I found a great deal on a P67 board and coupled it with an i3-2100. It rivaled my 965. Sandy was a game changer.

I built my youngest sons PC around an Intel platform. When the 965 I use now finally calls it quits I'll build an Intel. Ya it's more expensive but the performance...mmmm that performance.

 

[throwa]

For the longest time I was a die hard AMD fan. Dating back to the Athlon Xp era. Around four years ago I built my rig around a 965. I was in it man. I was balls deep into AMD. I was a fanboy.

Then my son got into PC gaming. I found a great deal on a P67 board and coupled it with an i3-2100. It rivaled my 965. Sandy was a game changer.

I built my youngest sons PC around an Intel platform. When the 965 I use now finally calls it quits I'll build an Intel. Ya it's more expensive but the performance...mmmm that performance.

My first epiphany came when I was reading some Tomshardware article about CPU performance during gaming. I couldn't help but notice that at the end of all their little benchmarks, on the chart with the raw data, I saw Pentiums defeating AMD quad-cores..... lowly Pentiums. Then I scrolled up a little more and saw that Core i3's were not too far off in performance from the Core i5's.

Couple months later I built a system around the 2500k

 

[eternalone]

My main concern is multi threaded games and Virtual machines, will the new skylake i3 cpus' being able to handle those with ease, over lets say an Amd 8350?? Because I want to be playing BF4 while running a couple Virtual machines and would like the single threaded performance of Intel without my cpu choking. So im aiming for the Skylake i3 budget build, or should i just buy a used fx8350 and deal with the slow single thread performance.

 

[TheELF]

If you want to multitask on few cores you will have to fine tune usage on your own.
Almost every game starts with a high priority meaning that it will hog a lot of resources,you will have to run your games on low or even idle priority so it will leave as much resources as the VMs need,you can even use a tool like riva tuner to limit FPS on the game so there will be more cycles left for the background programms.
Using VM(ware) tools will also help alot since they will make it so that the VM will draw only as much resources as they need.


Of course if you only want the VMs to stay open but not actually doing anything than it's a mute point they won't need anything from the cpu.

 

[AtenRa]

Intel's Haswell i3's have (in almost all cases) better multithreaded performance than AMD's quads, and are often close to the FX-6300. I imagine a Skylake i3 would have performance similar to or better than an FX-6300 in multithreaded tasks. So, yes, I'd say it's worth it.

EDIT: I'll dig up some benches in a few minutes.

Dont thing so,

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2420502

 

[AtenRa]

My main concern is multi threaded games and Virtual machines, will the new skylake i3 cpus' being able to handle those with ease, over lets say an Amd 8350?? Because I want to be playing BF4 while running a couple Virtual machines and would like the single threaded performance of Intel without my cpu choking. So im aiming for the Skylake i3 budget build, or should i just buy a used fx8350 and deal with the slow single thread performance.

BF4 MP and Multi-Tasking with the Core i3 is not what you want no matter of the ST performance.

Edit: If you can find a FX8350 at or lower price than Core i3 then for BF4 and any Multi-Tasking its way faster.

 

[ShintaiDK]

2 good cores is just better than 4 poor:
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1497?vs=1197

And its only getting worse for the 4 poor cores in gaming.

 

[Sweepr]

Haswell Core i3 already beats AMD's quads, ~10-12% better performance assuming IPC+clock bump would put them at FX6300 level of MT performance (or better) while crushing AMD in any ST task. Also there's a chance BCLK overclocking will be possible this time.

Vishera is a tired power hog on an old platform, I wouldn't recommend it for any brand new system unless you're upgrading from an old AMD CPU.

www.hardware.fr/articles/901-3/performances-applicatives.html

 

[Yuriman]

My main concern is multi threaded games and Virtual machines, will the new skylake i3 cpus' being able to handle those with ease, over lets say an Amd 8350?? Because I want to be playing BF4 while running a couple Virtual machines and would like the single threaded performance of Intel without my cpu choking. So im aiming for the Skylake i3 budget build, or should i just buy a used fx8350 and deal with the slow single thread performance.

You'll not want to run several VMs on an i3 while gaming.

AMD's FX chips are pretty weak, but run most games adequately at stock. A handful will be noticeably slow. On the other hand, I expect most games would be noticeably slow on an i3 if you're trying to run VMs at the same time.

Dont thing so,

IMAGES

I wouldn't have linked Cinebench, considering AMD's non-overclocked chips lose to the i3, and do so while drawing (at the wall) nearly twice the power. They do win in 7-zip, PovRay and x264, but Anand lumped those all into "synthetic benchmarks". And, for what it's worth, i3's win in x265, so there's your future-proofing.

If OP is willing to overclock, an Athlon 860K is not a bad value, but honestly it's not going to do much (if any) better than an i3 if OP is trying to run several VMs while gaming.

I'm reluctant to recommend any socket AM3 product these days unless you already have an AM3 board, but a VM box is one of the few tasks which AMD's FX chips may actually make sense in. You'd probably get a lot more useful years out of a Core i7-based PC (or even an i5), but you'll spend more money up-front.

Also, just a thought, but current speculation is that we'll be able to overclock Skylake i3's. A 4.5-4.8ghz i3 with Skylake's IPC improvements will be a pretty darn respectable chip.

 

[TheELF]

Dont thing so,

You just made yurimans point,except for heavily unoptimized code like 7-zip and x264 or rendering (so basically only rendering) is pretty much "in almost all cases" .

 

[Sonikku]

Only problem with an i3 vs say an AMD Quad for gaming is that some games just won't boot under a dual core regardless as for its ability to run it. "Why? F*ck you is why, I only run under a Quad!!" ಥ_ಥ

 

[Yuriman]

Only problem with an i3 vs say an AMD Quad for gaming is that some games just won't boot under a dual core regardless as for its ability to run it. "Why? F*ck you is why, I only run under a Quad!!" ಥ_ಥ

As far as games are concerned, an i3 is a quad core, and no game has refused to open on one. There have been a few cases of games not opening properly on Pentiums and Celerons which lack HT.

 

[ShintaiDK]

And all those games have been patched to run on dualcores now.

the issue was because its direct console ports, and core 0+1 is locked by the console for OS.

So on a quad without patch, you would have 2 idle cores.

 

[lyssword]

Only problem with an i3 vs say an AMD Quad for gaming is that some games just won't boot under a dual core regardless as for its ability to run it. "Why? F*ck you is why, I only run under a Quad!!" ಥ_ಥ

nah, you're thinking of 2core/2thread like g3258, not 2c 4t like i3. Although I can tell you there exists a hack around that issue for any game.

 

[StrangerGuy]

With regarding the thread title, if:

$150 i3 locked = Meh
$150 i3-K = Still meh
$110 i3, 3.8+ GHz stock = Not bad
$110 i3, BCLK OC enabled on Z170 mobo = Sweet
$110 i3, BCLK OC enabled on H110 mobo = GG AMD

 

[TeknoBug]

If the Skylake Core i5 are going to be 65W, I wonder what the Core i3 will be.

I read somewhere 35W.

Only problem with an i3 vs say an AMD Quad for gaming is that some games just won't boot under a dual core regardless as for its ability to run it. "Why? F*ck you is why, I only run under a Quad!!" ಥ_ಥ

Games will see the i3 as a quad core due to 4 threads.

You'll not want to run several VMs on an i3 while gaming.

I've done that on my i3... lol

 

[Insert_Nickname]

After seeing their Gen9 graphics I have a feeling Skylake i3's will make for very worthwhile "general purpose" media chips. Coupled with an Alpine Ridge controller for HDMI 2.0/HDCP 2.2, it could make a killer HTPC chip.

Gaming potential is also looking promising when coupled with discrete cards. Haswell i3's are already nothing to scoff at, especially the higher clocked models. Although the higher clocked Haswell i3's are dangerously close to i5 territory. It'll likely be the same with Skylake, higher clocked duals vs. lower clocked quads at about the same price.

 

[dark zero]

I5 Skylake is far better due real cores strength. I3 can't resist in the long run.