Intel Core i3-4170 vs Intel Core 2 Quad Q9650

Core i3-4170 vs Core 2 Quad Q9650 comparison

According to the hardwareDB Benchmark tool, the Core i3-4170 is faster than the Core 2 Quad Q9650. Furthermore, our gaming benchmark shows that it also outperforms the Core 2 Quad Q9650 in all gaming tests too.

When comparing core counts for these CPUs, we notice that the Core 2 Quad Q9650 has significantly more cores with 4 cores compared to the Core i3-4170 that has 2 cores. But they both have the same number of threads. With our hardware info, we find that the Core i3-4170 has a slightly higher clock speed than the Core 2 Quad Q9650. A Core i3-4170 CPU outputs less heat than a Core 2 Quad Q9650 CPU because of its significantly lower TDP. This measures the amount of heat they output and can be used to estimate power consumption.

Modern CPUs generally have more logical cores than physical cores, this means that each core is split into multiple virtual cores, improving efficiency for parallel workloads. Indeed, the Core i3-4170 has more threads than cores. Each physical core is split into multiple threads.