Having dominated enthusiast gaming with its i5 and i7 line, it's fair to say that the baseline i3 line is often overlooked, but the reality is that in most games, Intel's dual-core, quad-thread processor is still capable of handing in creditable performance, even on the very latest titles that explicitly specify higher-spec CPUs for their recommended settings. Over the last year, our Core i3 4130 has served us well in our budget gaming build, but with the arrival of its new-gen Skylake successor, there are some genuinely impressive gains. Prices still need to settle down (we paid £93 for this chip - typically £10 over the odds for an i3) but the benchmarks and the gameplay performance are fascinating - and there is some overclock potential, just not quite where you might expect to find it.
We've already reviewed the key Skylake processors aimed at the higher-end enthusiast - the Core i5 6600K and the Core i7 6700K - finding them both to be best-in-class parts with impressive performance improvements over their predecessors in CPU-bound gaming scenarios. The boost to Skylake's raw capabilities comes from a number of factors - firstly that the processor features two generational improvements over its direct predecessor, Haswell (Broadwell only received a limited desktop release) and secondly that the standard DDR3 system RAM is replaced by DDR4, meaning higher levels of memory bandwidth. These factors are just as important for the dual-core Skylake i3, and in the case of the move to DDR4, possibly more so.
On top of that, the i3 also features all of the other architectural improvements enjoyed by the quads, including more internal PCI Express bandwidth, principally allowing for more, faster storage solutions to be attached. However, the chances are that the i3 will be paired with lower-end motherboards with more limited expansion opportunities - but as we'll shortly discover, there are performance benefits from choosing a better board to pair with the new dual-core CPU.
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