Intel Core i3-550 vs Intel Core i7-4600U

Compare Intel Core 2 core CPU vs Intel 4th Generation Core i7 2 core processor, specs and benchmark score. Which is the better CPU for gaming?

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Other Benchmarks
Specifications
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Intel Core i7-4600U

Price

The cheapest price from our partner retailers

$ 129.95

$ 3114.05 significantly less expensive

$ 3244.00

Benchmark Score

Overall Score

A combined score of all workloads

1048 points

1087 points

3% slightly better overall score

Gaming Score

The raw gaming performance with a fast GPU

1976 points

2192 points

10% slightly better gaming score

Multitasking Score

Performance in workloads using up to 8 cores

795 points

800 points

0.63% slightly better multitasking score

Heavy Workload Score

Performance in workloads using up to 16 cores

763 points

767 points

0.52% slightly better heavy workload score

Free CPU Benchmark

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Other Benchmarks

Blender score

Cycles Render (Samples per minute)

9.59 points

16.74 points

74% significantly higher Blender score

Geekbench 5 (multi) score

Multi threaded benchmark

911 points

1589 points

74% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (multi) score

Geekbench 5 (single) score

Single threaded benchmark

417 points

847 points

103% significantly higher Geekbench 5 (single) score

Geekbench 6 (multi) score

Multi threaded benchmark

899 points

1627 points

80% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (multi) score

Geekbench 6 (single) score

Single threaded benchmark

437 points

880 points

101% significantly higher Geekbench 6 (single) score

Specifications

Cores

Number of physical processing units

Identical

Threads

Number of logical processing units

Identical

Clock Speed

Base frequency at which the chip operates

3.2 GHz

52% significantly higher clock speed

2.1 GHz

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the CPU

73 W

15 W

386% significantly lower TDP

PCIe Lanes

Number of physical connections between the CPU and expansion slots

33% slightly more pcie lanes

Memory Channels

Lanes for simultaneous memory access

Identical

Supported Memory

Maximum amount of RAM supported by this CPU

38 GiB

137% significantly more supported memory

16 GiB

Other details

Rank

Ranking in the hardwareDB database

934th of 1,089

926th of 1,089

Family

The product line

Core

4th Generation Core i7

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2010 May

2013 August

Memory Type

The type of memory used by this chip

DDR3-1066

DDR3-1333

Supports ECC memory

Does this CPU support error correcting memory

Core i3-550 vs Core i7-4600U comparison

In our benchmarks, the Core i7-4600U beats the Core i3-550 in overall performance. Furthermore, our gaming benchmark shows that it also outperforms the Core i3-550 in all gaming tests too.

Info from our database shows that they both have the same core count and the same number of threads. These CPUs have different clock speeds. Indeed, the Core i3-550 has a significantly higher clock speed compared to the Core i7-4600U. The Core i7-4600U outputs less heat than Core i3-550 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 i3-550 has more threads than cores. Each physical core is split into multiple threads.