Intel Core i3-540 vs Intel Core i7-4600U

Core i3-540 vs Core i7-4600U specs and performance

In our benchmarks, the Core i7-4600U beats the Core i3-540 in overall performance. Furthermore, our gaming benchmark shows that it also outperforms the Core i3-540 in all gaming tests too.

Info from our database shows that they both have the same core count and the same number of threads. With our hardware info, we find that the Core i3-540 has a significantly higher clock speed than the Core i7-4600U. The Core i7-4600U outputs less heat than Core i3-540 thanks to a 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 i3-540 has more threads than cores. Each physical core is split into multiple threads.